


Votum Separatum

by Orabla



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alien Abduction, Emotionally Hurt Spock (Star Trek), Federation Politics, Hurt Jim, Hurt/Comfort, Negotiations, Shore Leave Gone Wrong, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 63,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26792596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orabla/pseuds/Orabla
Summary: Captain Kirk is abducted by alien separatists, who object to their planet's joining the Federation. Before he is rescued by his crew, he spends some very unpleasant moments on the enemy ship... However, it would be wrong to assume that, once rescued, his problems have ended. How will his crew, his friends, react to what was done to him? What will happen to the joining treaty after such an obvious act of hostility?
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11





	Votum Separatum

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first attempt at writing Star Trek fanfiction. I did my best, but would be grateful for any indications about how I could improve my writing. Or for any comments and impressions at all!  
> Warning: at the beginning, there is some (mildly graphic) violence, cruelty and torture.

Votum separatum

James T. Kirk looked at himself in the mirror once more, pushing back an undisciplined lock of hair from his forehead and smoothing a lone wrinkle on his fancy civilian jacket, its clean, sharp shape highlighting his strong yet graceful form. Reflected behind him was the slightly outdated interior of the room in the Iowa farmhouse that had seen his childhood, as well as the slender, black-haired figure of his First Officer clad in an old-fashioned Terran flannel shirt, still worn probably only in Iowa countryside. The greenish, austere face below smooth shining fringe was wearing a look of mild interest, marred with the slightest hint of disapproval. Sufficiently distinct, though, for Kirk to notice it, even though he got only a glimpse of it in the mirror.  
“What is it?”, he questioned anxiously. “Do you think I should change the jacket into something more casual?”  
“Not being an expert in Terran fashion, I would hardly know”, the Vulcan answered dryly. “I merely find these lengthy preparations illogical...”  
“Oh”, Kirk chuckled, his cheeks flushing slightly. “You're right, I'm being vain... Tony said he would be bringing around more of the folks from before, and I was hoping maybe Jenny or Patty would be showing as well... You know, a night in a bar with old acquaintances to impress is just about the type of situation that will make us human beings indulge in such petty vanities as pretty clothing...”  
“Jim”, Spock put in evenly, “I did not mean to criticize you, especially that in your case, being vain hardly needs a pretext as convenient as the one you have tonight” - Kirk shot him a surprised glance, followed by a look of mock hurt. “I merely judged your efforts superfluous, since already thirty four minutes ago your appearance was beyond further improvement.”  
“Wait, what do you mean: beyond improvement?” Kirk sounded really hurt now.  
“I meant that, even sparing another standard hour for those strange ministrations you have been indulging in the last ninety eight minutes, you could do nothing to look better than you did already thirty four minutes ago”, Spock explained patiently.  
“That's too bad. I'd really like to look my best”, Kirk answered, too busy with the anticipation of his evening to analyze carefully what his first officer was telling him.  
“I just told you you do”, Spock mercifully translated, despairing of the ability to logic in a human visibly entranced with the prospect of impressing some Jenny or Patty.  
“Oh”, Kirk paid him more attention. “Thank you, Spock. Are you sure you don't want to come with me? I almost forced you to come to Riverside in the first place, I feel bad about leaving you for the entire evening with just my mother...”  
“She is perfectly suitable company”, Spock cut in. “You did not force me to do anything: as you are well aware, crew cannot be ordered to spend their leave in a particular place. I was quite willing to accept your kind invitation. Jim, for the three days that we have spent here so far you have not left me alone for more than seven minutes. An evening in a crowded, loud bar with your childhood friends and... uh... girlfriends, everybody drinking alcohol and likely indulging in all sorts of alcohol-induced behavior, hardly seems an appealing way to spend my evening. You, however, are welcome to enjoy it. I also suggest that you might want to put yourself on your way, unless it is your intention to make everybody wait for you...”  
“No, it's not. I guess I'd really better be going. Are you sure it's fine with you?”  
Spock patiently reiterated his assurance that staying in the farmhouse with Mrs. Kirk, the Kirk's library, and the lovely nature around was, in fact, a pleasurable prospect. With one last touch to his stray lock of hair, Kirk finally detached himself from the mirror and went with Spock downstairs, where he threw a short, laughing goodbye at his mother.  
“My handsome boy! You look great!”, she told him, casting him an admirative glance and holding him briefly in her arms.  
“Thanks! Don't expect me before midnight... In fact, noon tomorrow is much more probable! Can I take the motorbike?”, Kirk asked hopefully, new excitement adding to his already quite obvious anticipation of the enjoyable evening.  
“Of course. It's been a while since it was last used, but I make sure it's always maintained in top condition, just in case... Just promise me you won't drive it back home unless you're completely sober.”  
“I promise”, Kirk replied, frowning and casting Spock a seemingly confused glance, as if he was surprised his mother would even point out such an obvious thing to him. Spock strongly doubted if Mrs. Kirk's entreaty was as unnecessary as the glance suggested, but he limited himself to wishing his captain a pleasurable evening. After a moment, they heard the characteristic purring of the engine, and they watched through the window while Kirk, rapidly gaining speed, made it through the yard and to the road, in no time becoming a tiny black spot against limpid Iowa sky, now pink and golden as the Earth's venerable star had begun sinking behind the horizon.  
“It's good to have him home, even for just a few days”, Mrs. Kirk said dreamily. “A good thing Tony called, too: it's been years since they saw each other, and all the other folks from back then... So much catching up! Some of them might even not realize he's a starship captain, in the middle of his first deep space mission...”  
“Indeed”, Spock politely agreed. Then, a rather disquieting thought suddenly occurred to him. “I was not aware it was captain's friend who had called him. The Enterprise was ordered to Earth in a rather unexpected manner, due to another ship's incapacitation resulting in the impossibility to fetch the Tellarite Councilwoman for the negotiations about admitting a new planet to the Federation. Our leave was allowed on a remarkably short notice...”  
“That's true”, Kirk's mother looked up at Spock guiltily, “but I was so excited about his visit – and yours, of course – that I'm afraid I alerted the entire Riverside about it... I told some relatives, some friends, and even Tony's mom directly, she's a good friend of mine. Is it a problem?”  
Spock seemed relieved, and reassured her immediately.  
“No, not at all. Our presence on Earth is no military secret. I merely found it strange that a relatively distant acquaintance would possess this information, since it was unexpected even to ourselves till the last moments. But your explanation is perfectly sufficient.”  
Having clarified this matter, Spock offered some help with the dinner, which was accepted in a most natural manner, and working the fresh, fragrant, locally harvested vegetables proved as satisfactory as the conversation accompanying it, permitting Spock to discover many unknown facts about Kirk's younger years. Were he a human, he would immediately start imagining the most mischievous ways to use this new knowledge against his captain, but as a Vulcan, he contented himself with taking mental notes of everything that made him know his friend yet a little better.

When Kirk woke up, he was feeling disoriented and sick, his head aching and spinning furiously. And no, it wasn't the disorientation, sickness or headache that formed the ordinary, if unwelcome aftermath of immoderate alcohol consumption. Which was quite understandable, given that he hadn't consumed any alcohol; in fact, he had never even made it to Sunset Bar or seen any of his childhood friends. He tried to move, to have a look around, only to discover that he couldn't even open his eyes due to a tight blindfold, and he was tied by the wrists to something above him, his feet barely touching the ground. He shook his head in an effort to clear it a little, to break through this haze of disorientation that had prevented him initially from even realizing that he had been dangling from somewhere, stretched and uncomfortable, for what seemed like a rather long time, because he could hardly feel his hands and arms at all. The silence around him was disturbed by a regular, quiet hum in the background, very much like the engines of his own starship. He felt the air very still around him, which confirmed his conclusion that he wasn't outside. The temperature was comfortable, which was just as well since, as he realized with dismay, the blindfold was the only piece of clothing he was wearing. He also became aware of a very strange, sweet but slightly nauseating smell he was quite sure of never having felt before. Before he could pretend to make any sense of it, his attention was suddenly claimed by an unexpected blow to his back, administered with something that felt like a flexible stick of some kind, although Kirk had not been beaten before with a sufficient variety of tools to be able to recognize more exactly the nature of this particular one. Nor did he care to: he was so surprised that he cried out at the sudden pain. The strike was followed by a second one, then a third one, then a whole lot more of them, dealt at a vivid pace, with a remarkably steady force. Kirk kept himself from making any more sounds, and desperately tried to understand the essence of his situation. He remembered quite precisely how he had headed to the bar where he was supposed to meet Tony, and then, as soon as he got off his motorbike and tried to park it in the appointed area, he felt a characteristic stab of pain... like a dart hitting his neck. That was his last memory, and it didn't bode well, especially when combined with the fact that he was bound, stripped, blindfolded and beaten. Was Tony safe? Was his mom, was... Spock? The fact that he was taken when he was alone, at sunset, rather than kidnapped directly from the farmhouse, comforted him a little: maybe he was the only target. That was quite probable: he was the starship captain, after all. And visibly his adversaries were not powerful enough to dare an all-out frontal attack.  
What suddenly hit him as a little strange was that, although the painful force of the blows betrayed a great amount of strength being depleted to deal them, he heard no sound other than the regular claps of the stick against his flesh and his own panting, occasionally slipping into a grunt or a moan when a particularly bruised area was hit another time. His tormentor didn't seem to get tired, or at least didn't demonstrate it by as much as a louder intake of breath... An alien, Kirk thought, dismissing the image of a robot flogging him as implausible: the location of the blows seemed too malicious.  
“Who are you and what do you want? Where am I? Why don't you stop for a moment and maybe we could talk?...” Kirk decided an attempt at communication was worth a shot, especially that abducting and brutalizing a starship captain only very rarely was completely gratuitous. Of course, he didn't have to be the preferred recipient of potential claims, he could be merely a leverage, but in this case it was unclear why they would beat him. As his patience was about to wear thin, some of his curiosity was finally satisfied: the blindfold was removed and, in a dim, artificial light set for maybe forty percent, without any recess from what by now from considerable discomfort had become real agony, he found himself eye to eye with a creature of a kind that he had never met before. Generally humanoid, more or less his own height, he or, more probably, she looked like a blend of a human with a bird of prey. Her arms and legs seemed thinner, yet somehow harder, more dense than human limbs, and were covered with brown, slightly wrinkled, thick skin; both her hands and feet had only three digits ending with long, sharp claws rather than harmless nails. She had a well-shaped torso covered with brown and hazel, shining feathers, and two tiny, feathered as well, obviously useless wings were adorning her back. Her face was flagrantly alien by human standards, but it could seem attractive: there was a certain graceful symmetry to it, and the veil of splendid, long, golden feathers surrounding it added greatly to its appeal. Her eyes were two expressive, light green circles with black pupils, shadowed by feathery brows, and her mouth was shaped into a short, but hard and sharp beak, which seemed utterly uncapable of forming a smile. It was nonetheless very clear that Kirk was facing a sentient, thinking person, her intelligence clearly reflected in her eyes and expression. He even believed to recognize which species she belonged to: if his memories of Federation news updates were correct, she had to be a Ve’llarran, inhabitant of this faraway planet from the confines of the galaxy that was just about to become a new member of the UFP. Kirk had never met a Ve’llarran personally, but quickly recalled that they were friendly (well, that remained to be updated), intelligent, highly technologically advanced and, if memory served him well, telepathically gifted.  
“Hello, Captain Kirk”, she said in a high-pitched voice making the words sound more like a shriek.  
“Hello yourself”, he answered. “Listen, couldn't you tell your friend there to go take a pause for a few moments? My back feels like the flesh will separate itself from the bones...”  
“Ah, is such a thing possible in a Terran? That could be interesting to observe”, she retorted, cocking her head to a side in a gesture of playful curiosity, and Kirk suddenly regretted having been so visual in his choice of words. However, she waved her hand and the beating stopped, only the slightest rustle making itself audible as the other Ve’llarran moved smoothly to join the first one in front of Kirk. He was bigger than his colleague, his plumage had more black and grey tones, and the silver feathers surrounding his face were shorter. “I'm A'pwyllh”, the woman continued, “and this is E'llamrst. We are from Ve’llar.”  
“Nice to meet you, Appel and Ellam”. It wasn't nice, but Kirk was willing to give diplomacy a try. “I am not aware of any conflict between Earth or the UFP and Ve’llarr, yet I'm being treated in what clearly is a hostile manner. I'd like an explanation.”  
“Yes, we shall talk”, A'pwyllh informed him, and there was something threatening in her way of saying this. “There isn't indeed any hostility between Ve’llar and Earth. Even now, your Federation Council is negotiating with Ve’llar’s representatives the details of a joining treaty... The thing is, we don't want to join your Federation.”  
“I see”, Kirk answered impatiently. “I take it some of the Ve’llarrans want it, or they wouldn't have sent ambassadors to negotiate it... So who doesn't want it? By ‘we’, did you mean just yourself and... Mister Ellam here?”  
He didn't exactly intend to be rude, but dangling from the ceiling naked, thirsty and with an angrily sore back made him a little edgy. A'pwyllh, however, didn't like what and how he said. She lifted her hand and drew the three claws against Kirk's right cheek, leaving three deep, bleeding, burning cuts. He hissed at the pain, and although she couldn't exactly smile, her expression projected malicious contentment. She came even closer to him, pressed the tip of her beak against the wounds and pulled out a narrow, black, rough tongue, to lick the blood away with a clearly delighted look, which sent a shiver across Kirk's spine.  
“So tasty...” she said. “Are you aware, Captain Kirk, that Ve’llarans sustain themselves with raw flesh, preferably extracted from a still living organism? Obviously, we don't normally consume sentient beings, but I feel humans would be a wonderful exception. Bigger than a lo'kahrrh, no fur or feathers or carapace to bother with, just this ridiculously soft skin that tears at the slightest contact...” As if to prove her point, A'pwyllh slowly ran her claws against Kirk's chest, cutting deep enough into the flesh to make it actually painful. She seemed delighted when her victim gasped and grimaced.  
“It's not my place to object to your eating habits, but I take it you didn't kidnap me just to eat me”, Kirk said after a moment, judging it wise to distract A'pwyllh from licking his blood before her appetite grew too strong to be handled.  
“Oh. No, of course not. Not immediately, at least”, she replied, taking half a step backwards. “As you said, some of the Ve’llarans are enthusiastic about joining the Federation. Your people promised them quite a lot: protection from potential enemies, so many worlds to travel to and to enjoy, food synthesizers for when natural prey becomes scarce... My people have proven surprisingly easy to buy. After centuries of relative isolation, I guess meeting other species and flying outside has been the biggest appeal... But we don't all agree about it. You have the honor of speaking to the leader of Ve’llar Independent”, she gestured proudly at herself. “We don't want this treaty signed and we will stop it.”  
“I could bring your objections up to the Council”, Kirk offered. “I'm not sure if they're aware of any resistance...”  
“Oh, but they are”, A'pwyllh cut in. “We have made it very clear in countless communications. What do they care? They are only interested in getting access to Ve’llar's wealth, to our minerals, technologies, cultural treasures to ravage and appropriate... I don't believe your intervention would help our cause in any way. Besides, as you might have noticed, we are beyond peaceful solutions. We want to destroy the treaty with our own means, and you can be very helpful. To begin with, you will tell us every little thing about your starship, the famous Federation flagship Enterprise: especially the shields frequency, the weak points, the fire force necessary to subjugate it without destroying it…”  
“But”, Kirk interrupted in utter disbelief, “I can’t see how attacking my ship can help your cause…”  
“Surely your benign Federation will have nothing to do with a species capable of doing what we intend to do with your crew as soon as we take over the ship.” She paused, savoring the angry reaction that this threat got her from Kirk. “And of course, having such a wonderful machine with all its well renown technologies can only make us stronger…”  
“You’re crazy! The Council won’t abandon the talks only because a bunch of barbarians… Ah…” He stopped, as the claws slashed painfully through his chest again, then again, then several more times, turning it into bloody mess that A’pwyllh immediately started to savor with her tongue, causing Kirk to wince away in disgust. Almost soundless, E’llamrst moved gracefully behind him, and used his own claws to tear the skin of Kirk’s bruised and battered back. Moaning in pain, the Captain realized that rather than slashing angrily at random like his colleague, he was working at some sort of drawing, making precise, symmetrical moves with both hands. When he was finished, Kirk felt him lick at the blood as well, and the sound he made could only be interpreted as pleasure. However, he stepped back quickly and returned to A’pwyllh’s side.  
“So? Will you tell us what we want to know?”, she asked with obviously false, playful politeness.  
“You must be crazy”, Kirk temporized. “You can’t just abduct me like this… You will be caught before you know it! This Enterprise you would like to conquer will be in pursuit…”  
“They will try”, A’pwyllh agreed unruffled. “We will, in fact, lure them, ambush them. With the knowledge that we’ll have from you, we will easily defeat them…”  
“You’re dreaming!”, Kirk protested, but he knew nothing about the ship onboard which he was being held, and he couldn’t be certain that it was no match for the Enterprise. Of course, one thing he knew, he wasn’t going to supply the information that would compromise his ship’s odds in any way. He very much preferred to be eaten alive, it that was their method of making people speak. He tried his chance at talking them out of it one last time: “Maybe you should review your conceptions about the UFP? It’s an entirely voluntary association of worlds, based on mutual respect as well as respect for common basic rights and the dignity of each individual, of each world’s culture and particularity as well as what we all share in terms of rationality, capacity for feelings…”  
“Captain Kirk! The very last thing I need to hear are your propaganda speeches for your Federation”, A’pwyllh snapped impatiently. “All right, enough of this play”, she added, although Kirk would by no means agree to label anything of what had happened to him with this precise word. She shouted something that sounded like a command in a very exotic sounding language, and several more Ve’llarrans entered the room, carrying with them what looked like a chair with metal restraints. They unbound him, suddenly restoring circulation in his arms and hands, which caused him considerable discomfort, and fastened him to the chair. Not seeing any fire or energy weapon pointed at him, Kirk tried to struggle against them, but weakened and outnumbered as he was, he didn’t stand the slightest chance against the thin yet muscular hands that grabbed him, their claws digging deep into his flesh at the slightest move.  
“Are you more comfortable, Captain?” A’pwyllh asked him with mock politeness that must have been her trademark tone with enemies. “I assure you that very soon, I’ll have all the information I want.”  
“Tell me at least, why are you so pleased with tormenting me?”, Kirk asked her, trying to appeal to some core decency that most sentient creatures had, and that usually prevented them from resorting to violence when other means were readily available. “I haven’t even met you before, I’ve never wronged you in any way, yet you seem so happy to see me suffer…”  
“Oh believe me Captain Kirk, I am”, A’pwyllh confirmed with an enthusiasm that Kirk found highly disturbing. “Maybe not you personally, but another Federation starship captain, pretty like yourself, charming like yourself, his mouth full of smooth propaganda and thrilling promises just like yours, his starship full of new fascinating technologies like wonderful toys, grand words that you all seem so keen on throwing at unsuspecting aliens: friendship, respect, growth, knowledge, mutually enriching… And as soon as this starship captain, so similar to yourself, pronounced these words on Ve’llar, hearts were won over, ancient trusts and traditions were destroyed instantaneously, centuries of efforts at building a worthy civilization were trampled, a new era was summoned without full informed consent of those concerned… Oh how proud he must have been of himself, this other starship captain! Successful first contact… potential valuable new member… friendship and enrichment! I was unable to get to him, personally, but I am indeed happy to have you, his exact twin and duplicate! Besides, you’re not as innocent as you claim: you’re the one who fetched Tellarite Councilwoman to Earth for the talks, when my friends had managed to sabotage her initially prepared transport… Therefore, I assure you I will relish every moment of your torment. Long, if you don’t cooperate.”  
“I won’t”, Kirk promised, but he was trying to seem braver than he was feeling, as by that moment he was really scared. When his captors pushed a button on the chair back, some sort of pulse, not unlike an electric shock, coursed through the metal restraints against his arms, wrists, knees, ankles, forehead and chest, causing him to shiver and cry out. And it didn’t stop, it just continued shocking him again and again, causing excruciating pain, until he couldn’t help screaming and howling. Remembering that the Ve’llarrans were known to be a telepathically gifted species, he made sure to block out completely all relevant information, burying it deep in his mind and hiding behind mental shields that both his command training and some instruction from his Vulcan first officer had taught him to raise, while he tried to concentrate on something pleasant instead. The first thing that came to his mind was… Spock himself, his calm, impassive face projecting silent reassurance. Finding this image comforting, Kirk stuck to it through what seemed like an eternity of agony.

The next morning after Kirk’s supposed meeting with his childhood friends, Spock couldn’t quite fight off the annoying feeling of un-Vulcan anxiety assaulting him even though Kirk had expressly informed that he intended to come home as late as noon. However, remembering how fussy he had been about leaving him in the house without his company for the previous evening, it seemed illogical that he would be absent half the next day. When just before noon Spock mentioned his doubts to Mrs. Kirk, she burst out laughing.  
“Mister Spock, I believe you face too many dangers in your everyday professional situations… Riverside is no faraway planet, nor is it an important military facility, we’re in the middle of nowhere, what in the name of God could have happened to him? I think that, distinguished Vulcan gentleman that you are, you underestimate the aftermath of a well enjoyed social meeting in a human…”  
“I assure you, Madam, that I cannot be accused of such attitude”, Spock retorted, eyebrow raised, remembering the numerous times when the captain or Commander Scott or other crewmembers sought Doctor McCoy’s help after a “well enjoyed social meeting”. “However, I find it unusual for the captain to remain such a long time without contacting me. I tried to raise him on his personal communicator fifty eight minutes ago and the device did not respond, as if switched off or damaged.”  
“He’s probably gone to sleep in the morning and hasn’t woken up yet”, said Mrs. Kirk, shrugging. “But you know what, Mister Spock? If this is supposed to make you feel better, I could call Tony’s mom and ask about how the evening went… maybe Tony and Jim are still together?”  
“My feelings in the matter are irrelevant”, Spock answered evenly, causing tremendous confusion, “but proceeding as you suggest would indeed seem to be a potentially efficient way of determining the captain’s whereabouts.”  
After a moment’s thought, Mrs. Kirk decided that meant she was indeed expected to call her friend, and she distractedly chose her name on the communicator.  
“How are you, Mary Ann? I wanted to ask how was yesterday outing… The boys must have had fun, Jim has not yet returned… What? Wait… What do you mean, didn’t…?” Having suddenly turned as white as a sheet, Mrs. Kirk dropped the communicator to the floor and caught the cupboard for support. Spock was there in a split second, taking the communicator up and speaking into it with his impassive, even voice marred by a hint of urgency.  
“Mrs. Dowdy? This is Commander Spock from USS Enterprise, presently on leave in Riverside. It is my understanding that my captain, James T. Kirk, presently on the same leave, has gone missing.”  
“Now, wait, Mister Commander”, an audibly anxious female voice responded, “what is this all about? What was it Winnie was saying? She said her Jimmy was supposed to go out with my Tony yesterday night, right? Well, that must be a misunderstanding, for no such thing happened… Tony was at home yesterday evening and whole night, and never once mentioned a meeting…”  
“Captain Kirk claimed that your son Anthony had called him yesterday morning, inviting him out… He seemed very pleased at the prospect. He also mentioned Anthony’s intention to invite more people…”  
“But Tony never mentioned that to me!”, the woman seemed really puzzled. “True, I told him Jim was coming for a few days, but frankly, he didn’t seem interested at the news at all… Just don’t tell Winnie. Is it possible that Jim had some other business around, and invented Tony’s call to trick you guys into leaving him to it?...”  
“Very unlikely. First, the captain is not in the habit of lying to me, and I do not like that you suggest he did. Second, he proposed several times, with a fair dose of insistence, that I should accompany him, and seemed fairly disappointed when I declined.” And yet, I declined. I wasn’t with him and now he’s missing, maybe harmed. Maybe dead, Spock thought, and a cold shiver shot through his spine.  
“Look, eh, Commander, I’m sorry I suggested he lied, I didn’t mean ill, just you know, a boy will sometimes say something to be able to meet a girl, maybe an old flame… Nothing wrong, just… I was thinking about possibilities. I’d really like to help”, Mrs. Dowdy was trying to excuse herself, and Spock felt guilty about his unnecessary harshness with her. After all, whatever happened likely wasn’t her fault.  
“Mrs. Dowdy, I need to speak to your son urgently. Do not be afraid, I will merely ask him a few questions.”  
“He went out to check on the crops, but he should be back within the hour…”  
“I shall meet him then. Do I have the permission of visiting you at your home?”  
“Why, yes, of course. We’ll be waiting for you. Tell Winnie not to worry, you will sure find him in no time! Riverside is tiny, it’s not really possible to disappear here for long…”  
Spock closed the communicator and turned to Winona Kirk. She looked devastated, sitting slumped on a kitchen chair and staring into the wall with empty eyes.  
“I will endeavor to locate Jim, or gather necessary information, should wider search prove in order. Should he come back, it would be best if you remained here for the time being.” He recalled the other woman’s entreaty and risked an awkward attempt at comforting her, although he didn’t really believe what he was saying: “You do not need worry just yet. It could turn out fairly innocent…” But Mrs. Kirk shook her head sadly, and said:  
“I know something really bad happened to him. I can feel it clearly now. I don’t have proof, but I just know it. My boy, who came to me to spend several nice days… To rest his poor head, overworked and overburdened as he always is on this starship of his… How cheerful he seemed yesterday, how happy! Handsome, like a prince going to a ball…”  
“Mrs. Kirk, such grim brooding will not help us find him. Try to get a hold on yourself!”, Spock realized he was being unnecessarily harsh again. Yet the image of the cheerful Kirk from the previous evening unsettled him, and he just knew he couldn’t give in to grim brooding like she did. “Maybe try and think of what else can be done to locate him as quickly as possible. I will go to the bar, talk to Anthony, and alert Starfleet. I will take the aircar: I believe this is the fastest way of travelling”, he added in a softer tone, then as she nodded, he left.  
Weather was still as beautiful as the previous day, the warm soft glow of early fall sun was touching the trees slowly losing their green summer glory to turn into royal golds and reds of September, but Spock didn’t spare them a single glance. Even as he was driving the aircar in the direction of the town, Spock raised Starfleet Command and informed them that Kirk was missing and that substantial evidence indicated that it wasn’t a voluntary sentimental trip, but likely something much more dangerous. He suggested that the Enterprise crew should be urgently recalled from leave and that the ship should be ready for emergency launching, because there was no way of telling if the captain was still planet side or anywhere in space – if he was even still alive. Spock promised to call again if he managed to gather more information, which he was confident he shortly would.  
As soon as he got to the bar, he immediately noticed Kirk’s motorbike parked neatly in the parking area. At closer inspection, he became aware of certain signs of negligence that were very much unlike Kirk: the keys were dangling from the ignition, and the wheels were not properly blocked. It seemed fair to conclude that Kirk had been attacked before he even finished parking his vehicle, but still the Vulcan walked inside the bar and approached the bartender, asking him about last night. The man hadn’t seen Kirk or Tony or anyone suspicious; he admitted to having closed at about midnight, as the last client finished his beer and left. Leaving, he had noticed the motorbike and wondered who had come with it and why they hadn’t eventually entered the bar, but since it was none of his business, he hadn’t really given the matter much attention. However, when Spock asked him if he had seen anything suspicious in the past several days, he suddenly became more alert.  
“Suspicious, sir? Not exactly. Riverside is a calm and friendly spot, you know. I just can’t get used to all sorts of aliens popping out of nowhere and gallivanting across Earth like it was their place… No offence, sir”, he added, noting one of the slanted eyebrows shooting upwards.  
“Certainly, Earth is big enough for a few outworlders to visit every now and then”, Spock remarked dryly, getting ready to leave, but the bartender continued on a more urgent note:  
“Of course, I just wonder what exactly they’d be doing here… I mean, yeah, Iowa is pretty: nature, well maintained cultures, trees and all, but there are many more spectacular spots on Earth… And let’s consider, for example, the feathery ones: for the last few days, they kept popping in, unsettling my other clients, without any discernible reason for their being here…”  
“Feathery ones?”, Spock questioned intrigued.  
“Ah, you know. The folks from the new planet, Vallar or Vallara or something like that…”  
“Ve’llarr”, Spock supplied.  
“Yeah, that exactly. I saw their ambassador earlier on Central Broadcasts, apparently they’re having their accession treaty signed right about now… But that’s in San Francisco: why would some of their folks be wandering around Iowa? Not that it’s forbidden, God protect us, but just curiosity: why would anyone come to such place as Riverside?”  
“Could you tell me something more about them?”, Spock asked. Although he naturally didn’t share the man’s bigoted prejudice against strangers, his words triggered a red alert in his head. Signing the joining treaty was, of course, a very friendly and cheerful occasion, but it sometimes caused hidden animosities or discontentment to surface in most unexpected ways, like, perhaps, kidnapping a starship captain and using him in some manner to influence negotiations?  
“There were two of them”, the bartender obliged. “A lady, all covered with fluffy shining feathers, and a gentleman, with feathers in darker colors. They don’t speak to each other, just look each other intently in the eyes. They know Standard quite well, though, at least the lady always managed to make her orders understandable. Did you know they order their meat raw, completely uncooked? And then they consume it without even using cutlery, tearing chunks with their claws and letting blood drip from their beaks… It’s a little disgusting, and unsettling for my other clients, but what was I to do? I couldn’t exactly throw them out for ordering whatever it is that sustains them…”  
“You did well not to. Indeed, not every sentient species has developed a digestive system compatible with cooked food. Anything else?”  
“No, they didn’t exactly lead much of a conversation with me. They were very kind, though, and made a generally friendly impression. There was some beauty in them, although they resembled normal human beings far less than yourself do, sir.”  
“Thank you for your time”, Spock said by way of goodbye, choosing to ignore the last remark. He didn’t have enough evidence to point at Ve’llarrans as potential perpetrators, and idle accusations thrown against representatives of a race precisely now negotiating their accession to the UFP could cause serious trouble, therefore Spock decided to postpone his contact with Starfleet until he’d hopefully learn something more decisive during his interview with Tony Dawdy. The farm was outside the town, slightly isolated just as the Kirks’ establishment was, but Spock got there with considerable alacrity, all too human anxiety and impatience guiding his driving. He was greeted outside by a tall, dark-haired man in his mid-thirties, possibly Kirk’s contemporary, dressed in dirty overalls and visibly upset. He bowed, presented himself, invited his guest inside once the aircar was properly parked, called Spock alternatively “Commodore” and “Admiral” before being made aware of the proper rank by the Vulcan himself, then poured two glasses of brandy and downed his in a gulp, before he finally sighed and declared:  
“My mom told me everything, and about this call I allegedly made to invite Jimmy out… In fact, I honestly don’t remember calling him, but… there is just a thing…”  
“Yes, Mister Dawdy?”, Spock raised an eyebrow, intrigued.  
“I… I don’t know how to explain it… I don’t recall calling him, but in fact I don’t recall anything from last morning. Mom and Susan told me I had gone out to the fields as usual, and returned to lunch as usual, not mentioning anything strange, but I… I don’t seem to remember what I was doing, just as if I had slept all through the morning, except I don’t remember falling asleep, either… Now, when mom mentioned this call I supposedly made, there’s something… I really can’t explain it, but I’m fairly sure I actually did make this call… I don’t know why I would, as I had no desire of meeting Jimmy. Don’t get me wrong, I just… you know, I stayed here on the farm while he graduated from the famous Starfleet Academy, with commendations, and became the youngest ever captain of a starship… What could we possibly have in common to talk about?”  
“Jim spoke fondly of you, and was very happy anticipating your outing together. He would no doubt have had interesting tales to share with you, and would have been interested in hearing everything about your farming progress and family life…”, Spock said, resisting an unduly sentimental needle of sadness ready to stab him at the thought that Kirk’s childhood friends weren’t half as receptive to him as he was to them.  
“Yeah, that could have been nice”, Tony agreed, flushing slightly. “Have I gotten him into trouble?”  
“It is not unlikely”, Spock confirmed, his impassive voice tinted with gloom. “But it probably was not your fault. The bartender told me there had been Ve’llarrans in Riverside during the past few days: aliens slightly resembling birds of prey, their torsos covered with silky plumage of various shades of brown or grey… Are you all right, Mister Dawdy? Tony?”  
The man was now shaking uncontrollably, staring at Spock with utter terror, only by miracle holding himself back from crying out. Spock put a calming hand on his shoulder.  
“I take it you have met them, then”, he surmised. “Do not be afraid, you are in no discernible danger at present. Has the mention of the Ve’llarrans prompted some recollection of the missing morning?”  
“No, not really”, Tony managed, calming himself sufficiently to become able of coherent speech. “I just remembered… them. Only flashes, and… it feels like they did something to me… I can’t remember…” He hid his face in his hands and his shudders became more like sobs. Spock told him:  
“If you remembered some more details, it could contribute greatly to locating Captain Kirk… Jimmy, as you call him.”  
“I’m sorry, sir, believe me, I’d like to help, but…I just can’t…”  
“I believe there is a way for you to retrieve your blocked memory”, Spock told him cautiously. When Tony stared at him questioningly from between his hands, his face streaked with tears, Spock proceeded: “As you might know, Vulcans are touch telepaths. I could connect with your mind, temporarily joining it to mine, and try to remove the blocks directly in your head. The only consequence for you would be remembering again what happened to you; I would also be aware of your current thoughts and emotions, as you would be of mine.”  
“You would… read my mind?” Tony stared at him, so puzzled as to forget to give Spock the usual “sir”.  
“Yes, you can call it that way, but I promise I would search for nothing else than the event leading to you calling Captain Kirk. I would leave immediately after discovering the truth of the matter, and there would be no adverse effect on you whatsoever. But of course, however useful this procedure might be for locating the captain, I will proceed only if you freely agree to it.”  
“I… the Ve’llarrans… I think they did something like this to me…”, Tony managed, wincing away from Spock, as fear overwhelmed him again.  
“I believe they did, indeed, touch your mind. However, I can assure you that the mind meld will not at all feel the same as whatever they did. You probably suffered a violent intrusion to your mind, maybe were forced to do things against your will, while joining minds with me would be more like… communion. I promise that, should I notice excessive distress on your side, I would immediately terminate the contact. I would never seek information at your expense. I am asking you to trust me not to hurt you…”  
Fear and disgust were clearly visible on Tony’s face. However, he somehow managed to take hold of himself and he nodded to Spock, who instructed him to relax, sit comfortably, clear his mind and not resist his touch. When those conditions seemed roughly fulfilled, Spock gently pressed three fingers against Tony’s temple and pronounced the words accompanying the meld. Although the human did all his possible not to resist, Spock could feel his fear and expanded a great deal of effort to reassure him and enhance the trust that was not completely absent from his mind. When he felt Tony at ease, he reached gently toward the memory of the previous morning, covered by a sort of dense, impenetrable mist, and sensed the man tense again. He proceeded with extreme caution in order not to frighten or harm the human; but after some more time, he was able to see clearly what had happened. Two birdlike Ve’llarrans, a man and a woman, armed with phasers, paid Tony a visit while he was working alone, repairing a machine. The woman talked to him first, told him in a high-pitched, shrieking voice, yet in almost perfect Standard, that she needed him to call Jim Kirk and ask him out to the Sunset Bar for the very same evening. He protested, confused and by the very nature of the request suspecting some sort of trap, but when she threatened to murder his two young children and burn the entire farm down, the fear became overwhelming. After all, it was only an invitation: Jim would surely decline, and besides, he would have time to warn him later… So he called, and tried to be as persuasive as possible so as not to give the Ve’llarrans pretext for carrying out their threats. His friend’s enthusiastic reaction touched him to the point of almost making him warn him straight away, but preservation instinct proved stronger and Tony finished the conversation without leaving any hint of the trap. As soon as he finished, the Ve’llarran woman assaulted him telepathically and with extreme brutality erased the memory from his mind, leaving him unconscious.  
Having learned what he had been looking for, Spock withdrew from Tony’s mind. He now had proof enough that the Ve’llarrans were behind his captain’s disappearance, and that was a good point to start searching for him, although Tony’s memory indicated no possible motive for the aliens’ actions. Their brutality and ruthlessness, however, didn’t bode the captain well, and Spock was anxious to leave and put himself in pursuit of the captors. He barely noticed, already on his way out, that Tony was weeping like a child, slumped over the table, his head buried in his crossed arms. He came slowly back to the human and touched his shoulder lightly.  
“It was all my fault!”, Tony cried out. “Had I been braver, I could have refused… Or if my mind had been stronger, I could have prevented them from erasing the memory, and warned Jimmy… Now these sadists have him, maybe killed him already, and it’s all because of me! He seemed so surprised, but so damn happy when I said I wanted to see him… If he only knew what worthless scum he was talking to…”  
Spock was about to protest, but something about these words set off a sudden red alert in his mind. It was not unusual to experience guilt in Tony’s situation, but the violence of the emotion was surprising, as was the fact that Tony focused entirely on guilt when he should also experience shock upon having been so brutally blackmailed and assaulted… Terrifying realization hit Spock: it was his own subconscious feeling that he had unwillingly passed to the human. Of course, rationally he couldn’t blame Tony for what happened, but deep down, the more emotional part of him had instinctively formed the bitter accusation Tony was now repeating. This fact by itself wasn’t reprehensible: logic was a discipline of the conscious mind, and couldn’t be expected to rule supreme also over Spock’s partly human subconscious, but the fact that its contents leaked through the meld, although beyond Spock’s control, was a grave misfortune. The Vulcan fervently desired to find a way to make things better – he owed the human as much – but he felt that telling him the truth, thus admitting that suggestions could have been put inside his mind, would only increase his fear and confusion. Instead, Spock sat back down by the human’s side and spoke very softly:  
“You are no worthless scum, Mister Dawdy… Tony. You are as brave and honest a person as I have ever met. You told me everything you knew, even though it implied admitting to a strange and confusing lack in your memory. Despite the telepathic assault you had withstood, you conquered your fear and allowed me to meld with you, thus providing extremely valuable information. It was only reasonable of you to do the Ve’llarrans’ bidding: you have a family to protect, and you rightfully expected to be able to contact Jim later. You could not foresee they would block your memory. And please know that an untrained human like yourself can do absolutely nothing to resist a telepathic assault. I am not surprised that Jim spoke so highly of you, and I feel honored to have made your acquaintance.”  
“Thank you… Thank you, sir. These are very kind words,” Tony answered, wiping the tears away with his sleeve. “If Jimmy doesn’t make it… I’ll never forgive myself, though.”  
“I will do everything possible to ensure that he… makes it”, Spock promised, after which he took his leave from Tony and headed back to the aircar. The fact that, despite having promised otherwise, he did, unintentionally, hurt the human, disturbed him greatly. He knew that, no matter how badly he wanted to get information necessary to help his captain, he had no right to make innocent bystanders pay for it in any way. Vulcan philosophy, as well as the human ones worthy of any notice, stated that every sentient being should in every circumstance be treated first and foremost as a purpose in themselves, and only secondarily as a means to achieving a purpose. Had he objectified Tony, rushing through his already badly hurt mind to retrieve the precious memory, accidentally passing his own unconscious feelings through to him?... He knew he didn’t want it, he took all reasonable precautions, and he certainly also helped the human by uncovering the traumatic memory, rather than let it linger and torment him from beyond his reach, and yet… He couldn’t feel fully at ease with his action.  
However, he had no time for dwelling on the matter and, even as he set the engines in motion, he reached for the communicator to raise Starfleet Command and update them about his discoveries. The aircar made several sharp jerking motions before it smoothed its flight as he crossed the empty fields, alone.

When the Ve’llarrans finally switched the machine off, Kirk was so far gone he at first wasn’t even able to notice the difference. After several long moments, when he understood that he was no longer being shocked, he tried his best to make some sense of his situation, beginning with taking stock of his own condition. His muscles twitched uncontrollably, his nose and ears were oozing blood, and he became vaguely aware of not being able to control his bodily functions, this additional indignity revolting him only briefly, as it clearly wasn’t the greatest of his problems. Three Ve’llarrans detached him from the chair and jerked him to his feet, but as soon as their grip on his arms relaxed a little, he started slumping limply to the ground, completely unable to summon any strength in his tortured muscles. They let go of him, permitting his jarred chest to connect painfully with the floor, and started to move around busying themselves with what looked like some further preparations. Much to Kirk’s relief, they removed the chair from the room, then increased lights to eighty percent, making Kirk’s eyes hurt and blink, and finally produced a long and thick rope. They bound the captain’s wrists behind his back with one end, and passed the other through a metal element protruding from the ceiling. Then, they started pulling the loose end until they jerked Kirk to his feet and continued, stopping only when he was dangling several inches above the ground, his entire weight held by his unnaturally rotated shoulders and arms. He moaned in pain, forcing himself to remain as still as possible, because movements only increased the strain on the joints. From a corner of his eye, he noticed A’pwyllh watching his torment with undisguised delight.  
“Well, Captain, are you quite able of coherent speech again? Because the clarity of your talk while seated comfortably on the chair left much to be desired. Not that you were trying to say anything valuable, anyway: mostly profanity, but I might be incorrect, given how distorted the words were coming out… At least they weren’t hymns of praise for your Federation, because that would have been the one thing that would have likely made my patience snap.”  
“I… have no business talking with you”, Kirk answered, mostly because he was himself curious if he was indeed able of coherent speech. He was passably satisfied with the result, although his throat was hoarse from screaming, and the words were slightly blurred and much quieter than he wished them. A’pwyllh looked at one of her assistants, who moved and brought a glass of water, from which Kirk drank gratefully a few sips, appalled to realize how thirsty he was.  
“On the contrary, Captain. You have serious business talking with me. Otherwise, I could put you right back on that chair… But why bother? I believe a simple movement of this rope…” The Ve’llarran holding the end of the rope took the clue and jerked it suddenly, making Kirk’s arms rotate further backwards, the tendons and ligaments stretching further and beginning to tear. Kirk moaned. “That’s what I meant”, A’pwyllh commented, satisfied. “That’s your last chance: tell us what we want to know and the pain will stop, or refuse and… we’ll take it by force anyway.”  
“If… you could… take it from my mind… you would have… already…” Speaking was extremely difficult when his chest felt like being pulled apart by the weight of his own body. A’pwyllh smiled indulgently at the effort, or at least projected the impression of an indulgent smile. Kirk noted that she was behaving like someone having an ace up their sleeve, which scared him considerably. His situation was already so dire that the possibility of facing something even worse was genuinely disquieting, even for someone as resilient as him. He could hardly imagine anything more painful than the chair, or more disgusting than being eaten alive, but these were threats that they had already used, and he could sense distinctly by their relaxed, confident attitude that they had some other option to back their claims. He really dreaded to see it.  
“That’s true”, A’pwyllh agreed enthusiastically, “you have all your command information shielded beyond our modest talents for reading minds, but… you were thinking quite openly about so many other interesting things… like your Vulcan first officer, for example…” At these words, Kirk stiffened with terror, cold shivers shooting through his body: a reaction that he was unable to hide, and of which A’pwyllh immediately took delighted notice. “Ah, there you are. A precious asset, a Vulcan officer, isn’t he? Strong, telepathically gifted, logical, and in this case, also formidably loyal… He was so easy to apprehend, looking for you in isolated places like a certain Dowdy farm… And it’s you, yourself, your mind who guided us to him! One could practically say that you betrayed him… Surprised? Well, you see, we waited a moment quite undisturbed before we left Earth’s orbit: nobody was searching for you anyway, you were supposed to be getting drunk at the Sunset Bar, Riverside Iowa… And it was well worth the wait! Say hello to Mister Spock. If you don’t give away your ship’s technical details, you can say goodbye to him at the same time.”  
As if on cue, several Ve’llarrans entered dragging the shocking chair that had been previously used on Kirk, but this time, strapped tightly to it and gagged was the Vulcan. Kirk’s heart sank at the sight and cold despair took hold of him. He had heart enough to suffer any indignity for his ship or the Federation, but seeing his crew tortured or murdered in front of him was his weakest point. For the moment, Spock seemed unharmed, but he raised his eyebrows questioningly as he took in the captain’s condition.  
“No, Spock, I’m fine”, Kirk answered the concerned look automatically, without even realizing how ridiculous this sentence sounded from someone covered in blood, bruised, and dangling naked from the ceiling in a position that obviously caused him agony.  
“Oh, but I’m really hurt to hear this!”, A’pwyllh hissed, and the rope was jerked brutally again, causing Kirk to moan even as he bit his lip to stiffen the sound. Spock looked at him with compassion, maybe trying to project reassurance, but Kirk felt none, painfully reminded of what a noble person his friend was, and how many times his own strength returned after just one glance from these deep dark eyes. His thoughts were racing in his mind: maybe if he tried to lie his way out of it, to give them some false specifications, if only to temporize and give the Enterprise a chance at rescuing them? But then he remembered that he had already tried that, desperate to buy himself a little reprieve from the chair, while he was still coherent enough to try a lie: their telepathic skills permitted them to sense immediately that he was lying, and they made him pay for the attempt by dialing the machine up to an even higher setting. Maybe he could tell them the shield frequency… The Enterprise was bound to change it upon realizing that he had been kidnapped. But what if they forgot to do it? What if the shield modulator chose that moment to break down, as any piece of technology could? Besides, Kirk was quite sure the Ve’llarans, who could sense a lie, could also sense if he betrayed a piece of information he judged inessential, and would still have reasons to push him for more… And he knew that betraying any really vital information, technical or tactical, to these lunatics, was absolutely out of the question.  
“So, Captain Kirk, what will it be?”, A’pwyllh asked with this cruel mock politeness of hers. “You know, I could promise you to only use your ship while letting your crew live… Just tell me how to get to it…”  
“You know I can’t… Listen… You’re making a mistake! If you release Spock, I swear you can still be forgiven…”  
“I see… As you wish.”  
At A’pwyllh’s sign, the chair was activated and Spock’s body started to convulse in the same way that Kirk’s had earlier, although he had not realized how morbid, puppet-like a living body looked when jerked like this in all directions, nerves sparking and muscles twitching randomly, stripped of the dignity of volitional movement making the special grace of living beings. Looking at Spock’s agony was so difficult that Kirk struggled helplessly against his restraints several times, only succeeding at further injuring his shoulders. He tried to find comfort in the thought that the Vulcan could handle even severe pain in a manner more satisfactory than a human, but Spock’s suffering was so obvious on his face that the comfort was, in fact, none. After fifteen minutes of shared agony, the Ve’llarrans stopped the machine, and A’pwyllh addressed Kirk again.  
“All right. I see that this form of torture doesn’t impress you sufficiently, and I can understand it: it doesn’t do permanent damage, unless, of course, used without moderation. But I don’t have so much time or, more importantly, patience. Your officer’s time is very short now, and I want you to understand first-hand in what agony he will die…”  
She was now standing very close to Kirk. Without warning, she dug all three claws of her hand in the muscles of Kirk’s left arm, and then brutally tore the chunk of flesh enclosed between them, ripping muscles, veins and skin, causing a howl of agony. Satisfied, she put the bleeding flesh inside her mouth and ate it with a grunt of pleasure, additionally delighted by Kirk’s obvious horror.  
“You’re delicious”, she assured him.  
“You can’t… just eat my officer…”, he whispered disheartened, but he knew very well that they could, and that he would have to witness it, unless he betrayed his ship. Which he couldn’t do.  
“For the last time, Captain Kirk… how do we most efficiently disable your ship?”  
There was no answer, and A’pwyllh gestured at the three Ve’llarrans hovering over Spock, still fastened to the chair. Immediately, they started tearing at the most muscled parts of his body, attentive not to destroy main arteries too soon. Although, gagged as he was, he couldn’t scream, Spock’s face contorted in manners that spoke of his agony only too eloquently.  
“No, no, no! Please stop it! Please don’t, I beg you!”, Kirk screamed, squeezing his eyes shut against the horrible sight, only to feel his eyelid carefully pulled upwards with a claw, the gesture accompanied with wicked whisper:  
“You look, or I take your eyes out permanently, since you don’t intend to use them anyway…”  
So he looked, choking on his tears and sobs, pleading incoherently for mercy, and trashing against the rope until his shoulders broke all the way and his tormentors let him drop to the floor fearing that they might end up killing him.  
In the end, Spock was but an unrecognizable mess of green, white and black, and his captain a sobbing, shaking, hardly conscious body, with the rest of his awareness wishing for death.  
“Say, it’s not a bargain to serve under you…”, A’pwyllh commented, crouching beside Kirk on the floor. “You really showed your officer no mercy, although it had been you who had pulled him in our trap in the first place… However, I must say I’m impressed by this show you put on… Ve’llarans also value people close to them, but they wouldn’t beg and sob like this because of a mere officer… for a mate or a kin, maybe…”  
“How about: for a friend?”, Kirk asked brokenly, trying to gather some of his wits. “You will pay for this. I may not live to see it, nor do I wish to, but you will pay”, he spat out. A’pwyllh laughed merrily, or at least the noise she made sounded like laughter, although with her beak in the same position as always, it was really hard to be sure.  
“I admit that you are brave, Captain Kirk. You might think that we have already done to you the worst thing we could, and maybe this is true. However, there’s one more tool in my arsenal that I intend to use at present. I will inject you with a substance that will cause you horrible pain without actually damaging any tissues… At the same time, it contains a powerful stimulant that will prevent you from fainting or falling asleep. I wonder how long you’ll be able to survive like this: a day, or a week?”  
Kirk eyed her indifferently. After what he had just seen, he didn’t care about being tortured or dying; he just hoped shyly it wouldn’t last too long, but he was feeling so exhausted that he surmised he had a good chance of dying before completely losing his mind.  
But he had underestimated the strength of his organism, and his preservation instinct. Both his body and mind fought against the drug that was wreaking havoc in his system, making him feel like his blood was a river of fire, threatening at every second to engulf him and consume him in the eternal flame of hell. There was no reprieve from this pain, and soon Kirk was unable to remember Spock anymore, to think about his ship or about anything except this all-consuming agony. When after what could be hours or tens of hours the drug finally wore out in his bloodstream, Kirk slumped gratefully into dreamless darkness that could have stretched for any number of hours, impossible for him to determine. But then the Ve’llarrans came back to wake him up and torment him again. They ripped with their claws several fragments of his body and devoured them in front of him, delighted at the screams of pain and disgusted horror he was unable to repress, and cruelly reminded him this was precisely how his first officer had died, mercilessly mocking his despair and grief that he couldn’t help but show. They gave him a drink of water, then injected him with another portion of the dreaded drug, watching as he trashed and screamed in agony. He was only vaguely aware that they continued probing his mind; he knew that his secrets were hidden well, and the disappointment he sensed from them indicated that he was right. In time, when the injections and the losses of consciousness as the drug wore out kept going on and on, for what seemed like eternity, but could be days or weeks, Kirk became increasingly unaware of his surroundings.  
When he woke up one final time, still lying on the floor in what now was almost complete darkness, the only thing he was suddenly aware of beside the unrelenting pain of his many injuries, was Doctor McCoy bending over him.  
“Bones”, he somehow managed to voice, happiness to see his friend momentarily dominating over pain and exhaustion.  
“Don’t call me that, traitor”, the doctor replied coldly, causing Kirk’s eyes to shoot wide open with shock, his skin crawl with merely anticipated horror that these words elicited. “If you really had to tell them the damn shield frequency, couldn’t you at least have done it before they devoured Spock alive? Though maybe that’s a good thing. The poor Vulcan would have been so miserable to see his beloved captain talk like a parrot under such unrefined form of torture as a simple drug!”  
“But… but I…”, Kirk mumbled helplessly, terrified enough to dull his other sensations, but McCoy cut him off brutally:  
“Save me the talk, you bastard! Four hundred fifty people, all dead. Your crew! Our shields had been disabled before we even received the first blow. The Ve’llarrans beamed me up here to take care of you, and I swear I will, like hell. Here, I have something you appear to like. Serves you right!”  
“No! Bones! No!”, Kirk screamed desperately before being hit with another injection of the same drug. But now, with his ship, crew and honor gone he didn’t seem to find any motivation to cling to life. Assaulted by excruciating pain and overwhelming despair, Kirk’s mind shattered to a million pieces, and there was no one left to recollect them.

Ambassador Na’mhanwr was just having lunch in the elegant restaurant of the City Hall of San Francisco, one of the headquarters of the Federation Council, now in session to negotiate the treaty that was about to make her home planet, Ve’llar, a member of this most astonishing association of free worlds. The pride and happiness that she was feeling about this joining were beyond what she would be able to express, or what she would have been able to imagine before first official contact was established between Ve’llarr and the Federation several years earlier. The dazzling diversity of sentient life, the subtle beauty of so many different species living together, respecting those differences yet finding so much in common, amazed and delighted her. Ve’llarr had for long centuries been a rather lonely planet, and even when technological advances made the Ve’llarrans capable of space exploration, they had only rarely ventured beyond their own star system. Federation representatives took them out for the most unexpected journey, showing them miracles they couldn’t have even begun to imagine. Earth, for one thing, was so different from Ve’llarr, and yet so pretty in its own way! Thousands of Ve’llarrans have come to visit the heart of the Federation, Earth, Vulcan, and other fascinating planets, and all of them were awed.  
Well, maybe not all. There were those who feared that Ve’llarr was going too far, too fast, and was risking losing its identity if it joined the other worlds too closely. One of those who had voiced such unwarranted concerns the most insistently, filed several complaints and official protests before the Council, was Captain A’pwyllh, the owner of Shi’nw’aer, the finest starship that had ever left Ve’llarr’s shipyards. But Ambassador Na’mhanwr knew that this thinking was just the effect of a very frequent, not only in Ve’llarrans, fear of the unknown, which was clearly unwarranted in this case. She had observed the worlds building the Federation for enough time, and from sufficiently close distance, to be able to certify that every planet was blossoming, and potential costs of the membership never came even close to the gains. Luckily, Ve’llarrans sharing her own opinion were infinitely more numerous, A’pwyllh’s doubts speaking only to a marginal number of insecure individuals, unable to accept change even when it was clearly for the better.  
As Na’mhanwr was already finishing her delicious plate of assorted raw flesh from different Terran animals, alone at her table not wanting to startle other races with what for most of them was a peculiar, sometimes slightly nauseating choice of food, she saw three people approach her, maneuvering impatiently between tables, their expressions very serious and tight with worry. One of them was the president of the current session of the Council, Sanvek from Vulcan, accompanied by the Council’s Secretary Alain Ledon from Earth and a third person whom she didn’t know, a stunningly beautiful, blond-haired Terran woman wearing a Starfleet uniform with Admiral’s distinctions, who was immediately introduced to her, without unnecessary formalities, as Anastasia Vavrenko, general Chief of Operations. Na’mhanwr stood up, thinking that she must have wasted more time than she thought eating and musing about the treaty and that the session was about to reopen, but plenty of Councilmen and women were still eating and chatting; besides, the three officials’ expression of urgency, perceptible even on the Vulcan’s normally unreadable face, told her something was seriously wrong.  
“Ambassador Namar”, Sanvek addressed her, “there is a matter of great importance that we need to discuss immediately and privately, therefore I must request that you follow us to my office.”  
“Has something happened?”, Na’mhanwr asked anxiously, immediately complying and trying to push her way between tables as gracefully as her haste permitted.  
“Indeed, and most unfortunate for everyone”, the Vulcan replied without undue hedging. As soon as they were alone in his office, Vavrenko spoke:  
“One of Starfleet most illustrious officers, Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise, was abducted yesterday evening from his hometown Riverside, Iowa, where he was spending a short leave with his family, accompanied by his first officer Spock of Vulcan, to whom we owe all the accounts about the event. You have not met him personally, but we owe him that the negotiations could open without delay, as his starship fetched at the last moment the councilwoman from Tellar, whose regular ride had been incapacitated by some forces that we are still investigating.”  
“Yes, she had even mentioned him to me… Called him… charming”, Na’mhanwr remembered, worried for the unknown captain out of respect to Starfleet, but uncertain of how this matter could possibly be of any concern to her.  
“He was abducted by Ve’llarrans”, Vavrenko continued, and Na’mhanwr suddenly stiffened with shock. “It is beyond any doubt. Two of them were seen in Riverside by multiple witnesses, and were reported to have telepathically assaulted one Anthony Dawdy, a childhood friend of the captain’s, in order to make him set a trap that seems to have worked only too well. We checked with the orbit monitoring service, and we learned that one of the Ve’llarran ships orbiting Earth left later that evening, the Sha… She… the Shiner. Ambassador? Ambassador Namar? Are you quite all right?”  
Na’mhanwr had slumped to the chair closest to her, lifting a hand to her face and looking as if she was going to faint. Ledon grabbed a flat plate from a small coffee table and sprinkled it with water, handing it to the Ambassador, who licked the liquid gratefully with her narrow, black tongue.  
“That’s her!”, she exclaimed, sheer desperation piercing through her voice. “I should have known! I should have guessed! I sensed naked desperation from her, I sensed her irrational resistance to the wonderful idea of the Federation, and I knew she wasn’t a person to be taken lightly, but… I didn’t think she would resort to such abominable crime…”  
“Who are you talking about, Ambassador? We have not been able as yet to determine the identity of the kidnapper…”  
“But you said the Shi’nw’aer left orbit the evening of the event… Her captain and owner is A’pwyllh, the very person who spoke twice in front of the Council in the past days, pointing out the alleged drawbacks of our joining the Federation… She was outnumbered, outvoted, but apparently she did not give up…”  
“I see”, Vavrenko intervened. “So we have a rogue captain with her own ship, acting without your authorities’ knowledge…”  
“But of course!”, Na’mhanwr was both outraged and terrified that anyone could suggest that herself or another Ve’llarran official could condone a violent crime against one of these newly met, yet so friendly and benevolent beings. “If I had even suspected she might… attack you… us, attack US in any way… because we now are a family, aren’t we?...”, she lifted a mortified glance at the President.  
“Indeed, the attack Captain Appel perpetrated hurts strongly both the Federation and those of the Ve’llarrans who sought peaceful coexistence with it, or more”, Sanvek confirmed. “Under present circumstances, I am afraid that treaty negotiations must be postponed…”  
Sanvek was forced to retreat several steps, because the onslaught of despair, anger and desolation that Na’mhanwr projected all around when she heard these words was so formidable that the Vulcan’s shields shook under its influence. Both humans, on the other side, were compelled to come closer to the ambassador and offer her comfort.  
“‘Postponed’ doesn’t mean ‘cancelled’”, the secretary offered, slipping a friendly hand into the fluffy plumage between the Ambassador’s tiny wings. “I’m sure we will resume the talks once this matter is clarified…”  
“Clarified?”, Na’mhanwr was shaking violently and Ledon was sure she would be crying if Ve’llarran eyes were capable of producing tears. “You don’t understand… Does your Captain Kirk have any information that could be of use in breaking the negotiations?” As all her interlocutors nodded hastily, the ambassador knew the answer was yes. “And I presume he will not give it up willingly…” There were nods again, and Vavrenko added:  
“He will not give it up, period.”  
“Then he may be already dead”, Na’mhanwr concluded, hiding her face in her hands and producing sounds resembling stiffened sobs.  
“But…”, Alain Ledon put in, some confusion in his voice, “I believed that physically assaulting or harming a person, let alone killing them, was considered on Ve’llarr as a crime so serious that it was almost unheard of… almost taboo… Why would a person believing in Ve’llarran ways commit such an atrocious crime?...”  
“Your knowledge is correct, Secretary, but it’s not complete”, Na’mhanwr replied sadly, more shaken by the minute. “As I have already explained to the Council, justice system is very different on Ve’llarr. We don’t have courts or trials, and Ve’llarran citizens punish whoever commits an offence against them by themselves, physically or not, and in case of serious crimes it can be even by death.”  
“But Captain Kirk committed no crime!”, Vavrenko exclaimed. “He never even set foot on Ve’llarr, and I’m absolutely certain he has never done anything that Ve’llarrans would consider criminal…”  
“I know that, Admiral”, the Ambassador answered with another sob. “But since she abducted him, I presume she generalizes on him, and possibly on all Starfleet officers, the blame for what she considers as a crime against Ve’llarr: ‘invading’ it, destroying its culture… In this case, she will consider herself entitled by Ve’llarran law and code of ethics to ‘punish’ him in any way she deems fit… Oh my Spirit, what world would resume talks with a planet whose inhabitant tortured to death their, as you said, most illustrious officer?”  
“Now, we need you to calm down a little, Ambassador”, Ledon said with a tone that he wished reassuring, but that he was unable to completely rid of the gloom that Na’mhanwr’s grim prognosis for Captain Kirk instilled in every person in the room. “Kirk’s individual fate, while of course by no means indifferent to us, couldn’t possibly decide of the fate of an entire planet, and millions of benevolent people wishing to join the Federation can’t be held responsible for one rogue captain’s and her followers’ deeds, no matter how atrocious. I assure you the talks will be eventually resumed, once we’ll have apprehended this Captain Appel and clarified the legitimacy of her claims. Here, I’m making it a promise”, he added, one of his arms holding the shaking ambassador in a warm embrace, and the other stroking her cheek. Sanvek raised his eyebrows at Ledon as he pronounced the last sentence, but then quickly nodded assessing that, if he contradicted the secretary, the ambassador’s overwhelming emotions could completely block any further proceedings. Unable to resist an unprofessional impulse to put her hand on Na’mhanwr’s head, covered with luxurious shiny white feathers, Vavrenko continued in a tone of urgency:  
“Until we have proof to the contrary, let’s assume Captain Kirk isn’t dead and let’s make it a rescue mission. We believe that the starship best suited to effect it will be the Enterprise, Kirk’s own ship, and the crew whom we know very loyal both to Starfleet and to him personally. Ambassador Namar, we need you on that ship. The talks will wait for you, but your presence there is absolutely crucial. If the Enterprise manages to engage the Shiner, they will need your authority to negotiate or to attack: otherwise it could look like the UFP launching a military operation against your people, and the Ve’llarrans could turn against our treaty, which would be Appel’s victory. Are you ready to represent your people on our starship?” Na’mhanwr nodded silently, but confidently, most of her emotions managed sufficiently for her three interlocutors to restore a more relaxed posture to the conversation. “Good. Your help will also be invaluable as source of knowledge that we obviously lack. We have no idea of what Appel will do next, if she will engage any rescue vessel in battle or try to use her hostage as a leverage to force us to cancel the treaty: we just don’t know, and must be prepared for any eventuality. Also, any insight you can give us about the ship’s technical specifications would be great help. We know that it’s a large vessel that can transport up to 700 people, but needs a skeleton crew of about 70 to be able to function, while our orbit service claims they left with 200 people aboard: significantly less than what they had come to Earth with. We have no certain knowledge of the whereabouts of the remaining crew… We also know it has a plasma based weapon of alien design, some sort of energy shielding not unlike our own, and a good warp capacity. Can you add anything?”  
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about the Shi’nw’aer. I’m a diplomat, not an engineer… And it’s a private ship. I know it’s a very fast vessel, it can travel at warp 8 for long periods of time…”  
“Hell! And we’re already eighteen hours behind them…”  
“It has very powerful weapons, and the rumor has it A’pwyllh has upgraded them recently, perhaps illegally, after having met with some Orion traders on her way to Earth. I also heard that it has a very sophisticated set of holoemitters onboard: A’pwyllh enjoys holoprojections and is known to have made a real art of it…”  
“That information is of no tactical relevance”, Sanvek remarked, and Na’mhanwr made an apologetic gesture: she was doing her best to help. “Do we know why she chose to abduct Captain Kirk rather than sabotage the Council or take some other action that would lead more directly to achieving her presumed goal?”  
“That’s readily explained”, Vavrenko supplied. “Security here is virtually unbreachable; the same would go for snatching a ship away from the orbit: no other orbit in universe is as well monitored as Earth’s… Kirk was an easy target, alone and unsuspicious as he was during his leave. The information itself about his whereabouts has been obtained, the orbit service told me, probably by means of telepathically probing random crew for any potentially useful information. Not very economic, but used extensively, an effective method, and no one can expect all of Starfleet personnel to have comprehensive antitelepathic training... But let’s not waste more time here.” Vavrenko suddenly got up, finally disentangling her hand from the Ambassador’s rich plumage. “The Enterprise will be ready by now, waiting impatiently for us to make a move. We shouldn’t hold her up any longer. Ambassador, gather all Ve’llarran personnel that you think could prove useful on this mission, and report with them as soon as possible in the City Hall’s transporter room. You will further debrief the officers onboard about everything they should know about the Ve’llarrans and Captain Appel and her ship in particular. Here on Earth, we will try to reach other Ve’llarrans, maybe some of those who had come with Appel but apparently stayed planet side, and if they disclose any relevant information to us we will relay it directly to the Enterprise via subspace. Also, I want to make it clear that it’s a Starfleet mission and the acting captain of the Enterprise will be fully in charge of it.”  
“Understood. See you in a moment in the transporter room. An vannrr el’sarrwnh’yllh.”  
“Ambassador?”  
“Let the Spirit help us. A… traditional Ve’llarran good wish, I thought it wouldn’t make much sense in Standard, but felt compelled to use it.”  
“It makes perfect sense in Standard, Namar. We will need all the help that we can get.”

A’pwyllh was sitting in the captain’s chair of Shi’nw’aer’s bridge, trying to master, in vain, feelings of bitter disappointment. She had tried, in all fairness, to make her point of view known in legally accepted ways, speaking up in front of this ridiculous self-righteous Council, but Ambassador Na’mhanwr and her entourage had been more eloquent every time, which of course doesn’t mean: right. Fortunately, she had been wise enough to foresee her inevitable fiasco in front of this mutual admiration society of creatures from different worlds repeating grand slogans about friendship, solidarity and mutual enrichment, failing to understand that they were, in essence, slowly losing what made their very identity: their ways of life, their cultural backgrounds, their ways of thinking, sometimes even parts of their very biological heritage. Vulcans, for example: a proud race, physically and mentally stronger than most creatures of the quadrant, devoted to logic and in total and admirable mastery of themselves, respectful of all forms of life no matter how low on the evolution scale, and what had the Federation given them? Constant exposure to absurd creatures like humans, Tellarites or Andorians was obviously slowly leading them to abandon some of their austerity, they were presently known to smile on occasion, and they wandered so much off their initial, noble way as to mate with humans and produce hybrids who were unable to truly belong to either world, at constant war with themselves and their crippled souls. A’pwyllh was certain she wanted no such fate for Ve’llarans, whose beliefs and traditions had already been seriously shaken by the abhorred contact, but that still could be salvaged if Ve’llarr was to retain its independence.  
So, anticipating her failure to win by legal means, A’pwyllh had employed those of her crew adhering to her views to do all their possible to discover some breach of security, allowing her for any sort of diversion that would enable her to stop the negotiations. Unfortunately, the Council headquarters in San Francisco as well as Starfleet Command were probably the best guarded facilities of the entire Federation. Attacking one of the ships orbiting Earth, although A’pwyllh badly desired owning one of them, also seemed a fool’s project: even if she managed to briefly seize one and wreak temporary havoc in the orbit security services, she would be overpowered and removed before she could make actual use of it. Her odds were much better in deep space, where her ship stood, she thought, reasonable fighting chance against any one Federation starship, especially since she had equipped it with a new, illegal plasma weapon of Romulan design. Of course, the Enterprise was the most desirable prize of them all, so when her people announced her they found out her captain was on leave on Earth, nearly alone in the middle of American countryside, it was just the occasion that she had hoped for. The kidnapping itself proved rather easy, because humans – even most of Starfleet security personnel, affected to the watch of the orbit or monitoring the people beaming up and down the numerous starships hovering over Earth like an army of sorts – were relatively unaccustomed to telepathy. Obviously, making them do something against their will was beyond the talents of an average Ve’llaran and would be immediately discovered, but suggesting a little innocent thought, eliciting a piece of relatively irrelevant information, temporarily suppressing a memory or causing a little oversight was well within the realm of possibility, if one remained cautious.  
Once onboard the Shi’nw’aer with their incapacitated target, drugged and unconscious at first, A’pwyllh thought there was little she couldn’t accomplish with such an asset on her hands. She surmised the Enterprise would come to his rescue, and with all the knowledge she would have forced out of him by then, she was absolutely sure she’d win and, having the Enterprise and her crew in her power, she might be able to create sufficient diversion to make the talks stop, or to treat the officers as hostages to support her demands. However, things proved more difficult as the abducted human, Captain Kirk, turned out completely uncooperative. A’pwyllh had no previous experiences with breaking humans, or Ve’llarans, for that matter, because the physical punishments she administered to her crew in case of failings could hardly qualify as breaking. As a captain of a space vessel, exposed to the shortcomings of her crew, but also to contacts with various aliens, some of whom hostile, she did know a few things about administering pain, but she had certainly not expected someone so stubborn… Every single kind of threat or torture, both physical and emotional, that she could think of, proved not only insufficient to make him speak, but didn’t even permit her however strong telepathic talents to overcome mental shields that he had raised against telepathic intrusion. She had tried literally everything, and now when he was dying in agony, without any tangible mind left for her to try to reach, the precious information was shattered in all directions, fragmented into useless incomprehensible pieces, and further probing confronted her only with abominable chaos of her own doing. Painful, agonizing chaos where she had once touched a mind of rare agreeableness, well ordered, but passionate, brave and benevolent, with a unique joyful, sunny quality to it, a mind of a person she could have easily befriended if only he had understood and supported her cause, giving her the necessary information… She chose to project the image of a cruel, ruthless leader, which several years before had helped her to build her authority on the Shi’nw’aer, and initially she really felt the hatred she professed, focused on that single man in her power, but really directed at all of this meddlesome, irreverent Starfleet. But what she found in his mind wasn’t the greedy duplicity she had expected, the desire to subjugate other worlds even trampling their identity and way of life, but deep and authentic faith in all the ridiculous gibberish of friendship, solidarity, mutual enrichment. He wasn’t totally unlike herself, willing to put his health, his life, his friend’s life, on the line for the ideals he endeavored to uphold. By the time she had reduced him to confused sobs, tears and pleads, she didn’t hate him anymore half as much as she had at the beginning of their encounter, and the knowledge that all the pain she had inflicted had been in vain was causing her bitter regret. She wasn’t even sure anymore if, by torturing him to insanity, she didn’t breach the most sacred of Ve’llarrran laws: the unconditional prohibition of harming an innocent sentient creature. His mind contained no malice, no bigotry, only respect and benevolence toward other species: was he really to blame for his Federation’s mislead policy on her world? The only consoling thought was that at least, she had deprived Starfleet of one of their best officers.  
Suddenly, A’pwyllh heard the urgent thoughts of E’llamrst directly in her head:  
//She has just shown on our sensors! A’pwyllh, she has come! The Enterprise has found us!//  
A wave of apprehension shot through her. She had ordered moderate speed and a pretty obvious course – one leading directly to Ve’llarr – as well as deliberately marking their track by a distinct ion trace, a signature of sorts – because it was her wish to lure the Federation flagship into a battle she hoped to win. But she didn’t have the edge she had expected to have, she didn’t know how to disable the Enterprise the easiest, and she wasn’t so sure anymore. She still had the Romulan plasma weapon, and the captain as her hostage, but giving him away in return for freedom would mean that the entire trouble had been taken for nothing, and she wasn’t one to admit failure easily.  
//Fight it is, then//, E’llamrst thought to her, and she mentally nodded to him and to the rest of her bridge crew. The Enterprise was soon within visual range, and they saw her graceful, silvery form on their main viewscreen, slipping through the starry darkness like a mysterious swan proudly swimming over the deep waters of a nocturnal lake.  
//Shall I hail them?//, the communications officer asked anxiously.  
//No. Let’s give the initiative to them. Let’s see what they’ll be up to. I don’t think they’ll risk a very heavy assault at first: their captain is onboard our ship, they won’t risk killing him. They’ll want to talk. If they hail us, respond, but not immediately. They mustn’t think we are afraid.//  
//We are not!//, came from all the posts simultaneously. They didn’t wait long to be hailed. They temporized for several moments before responding. A’pwyllh was pleased to see confirmed her guess as to who would be leading the Enterprise: it was well the half-Vulcan first officer on the central seat, the one she had come to know so well through his captain’s mind, focused stubbornly on him through the worst of the ordeal, as long as he had been able to focus on anything.  
“This is Spock, in command of the Federation Starship Enterprise. I surmise you know what we want, Appel of Ve’llarr. Please know that we are prepared to take it by force, should you choose to refuse cooperation.”  
The calm on his intriguing, elegant face was impressive. The other officers that she could spot – the helmsman, the navigator, the communications officer – were all pretty calm as well, although not impassive. Doctor McCoy, another personality well known to her from Kirk’s mind, was perched behind Spock’s back, his features a mixture of anxiety and anger. And there was also Ambassador Na’mhanwr, standing very stiff and very upright against the railing, but her feelings were hidden to A’pwyllh. Ve’llarrans couldn’t really alter their facial expressions much; they communicated their feelings simultaneously to verbal communication by projecting them telepathically, and they were so eminently readable that non telepaths frequently imagined having seen a frown or a smile where there could have been none.  
“I have what you want”, A’pwyllh answered slowly, going back to her imposing, mockingly cruel persona. “He’s rather the worse for wear, but if you attack us, I assure you he’ll be dead at that very instant.”  
“I demand to see him”, Spock said. “Otherwise, we have reasons to believe that you might have killed him already. Refusing to produce proof to the contrary will confirm that suspicion.”  
“And you would risk it!”, she snorted. But she made a sign that caused one of her crew to leave. After a few moments, he returned with another Ve’llarran. They were dragging Captain Kirk pulling him by the hair. The sight was hideous: the naked body was covered with dark bruises as well as blood from long, angrily inflamed gashes, forming some absurd drawing on his back, and he kept twitching and convulsing, although there was no sign of any voluntary activity, whether meant to struggle against the painful grip or ease the discomfort by an attempt at taking some of his weight off of it. His arms were dangling uselessly, some of his muscles exhibited messy holes as if fragments had been ripped out, his face was contorted with agony, and his eyes, although wide open, were completely empty. But A’pwyllh suspected that even worse than the sight was the sound of the Captain’s agony now audible on the bridge of his ship: an unrelenting, hoarse shriek that made even the Ve'llarrans’ skin crawl, the feathers standing on their necks.  
“Here he is”, she commented carelessly, as her crew dropped the agonized human to the floor, and he fell limply, without ever ceasing the screams, unaware of his crew on the viewscreen. Horror showed on the faces of the Enterprise officers, with one notable, greenish-tinted exception. Ambassador Na’mhanwr stumbled against the railing. The dark-skinned communications officer rushed to her, took her in her arms and whispered something against her face.  
“You… bloody bastards!”, McCoy spat out when he was able to speak. “What did you do to him?!”  
“Here’s my offer, the only one I’m going to make”, A’pwyllh spoke, ignoring him. “You can turn back and fly away in peace, and we can take Doctor McCoy onboard to treat the captain. Or, you can take the chance to fight us, but then your captain is the first casualty, and I assure you we’re more dangerous than we might look.”  
“The only deal I am willing to accept from you”, Spock said, his voice completely level, “is one where you and your crew face proper justice for your crime. Letting you escape would be an offence to logic and shame for the Federation. If you surrender willingly, you will spare yourself potential casualties. Your ship is no match to ours. We can destroy you in a matter of minutes.”  
“I think you didn’t understand what I said”, A’pwyllh insisted, trying hard to look dauntless. //Show them//, she thought to E’llamrst. He moved soundlessly to Kirk’s side, bent over the convulsed figure and dug three claws of his right hands into his side, after which he slowly tore the flesh out and ate it, licking the blood trickling through his beak with a narrow, black tongue. The good thing was, his victim didn’t seem to even notice his action.  
“Delicious”, he commented. A’pwyllh could clearly see that her opponents were disheartened, all of them but Spock covering their faces, screaming or openly crying. The Ambassador was offered a seat and was being comforted by the communications officer, whose lovely face was streaked with tears. Strange that the Vulcan is the only one unaffected, A’pwyllh thought only to herself. I was sure from Kirk’s mind that they were best friends… But the truth also is, he’s Vulcan. Obviously, the Doctor shared her opinion, because he yelled at his commanding officer, shaking him by the arm:  
“Are you gonna do something, or will you watch Jim be eaten alive by those blasted feathered monsters?!”  
Spock chose the first option. He hit a button on the captain’s chair and asked with the slightest hint of impatience:  
“Bridge to Engineering. Mister Scott! How much longer?”  
“Scott here. Almost ready… Just five wee seconds more, sir!”  
“They have passed… now.”  
“Ready, sir!”  
“Energize! Wide range, everyone on the bridge!”  
//Our shields have been disabled//, A’pwyllh heard, and she threw herself in the direction of Captain Kirk to at least exact in advance a revenge for what she instantly knew was going to happen, but she didn’t have the time. She was dematerialized in the middle of her leap, and showed again in the transporter room of the alien ship, along with the still screaming Kirk and the rest of her bridge crew, but before she could even move, some sort of blast hit her and she lost consciousness. 

Doctor McCoy rushed from the bridge to sickbay, and arrived simultaneously with the gurney carrying Captain Kirk from the transporter room. The doctor was so badly shaken by what he had seen on the viewscreen that only years of practice in all sorts of crisis situations made it possible for him to take hold of himself sufficiently to be of use. His patient was making the things worse: his crazed, agonized, almost inhuman shrieks terrorized all the medical personnel, already spooked by the sight of his horrifying injuries. His empty gaze made it obvious that he was completely unaware of his surroundings and didn’t even recognize McCoy himself, when the doctor tried to speak some calming nonsense to him. A rapid scan showed immediately that, aside from the bruising, badly inflamed gashes and torn muscles, completely crushed shoulders, erratic life readings, there was some sort of alien drug in his system, torturing him and at the same time preventing him from passing out. McCoy injected him with a sedative to counteract its effects and buy himself a little calm to work, but it seemed like the drug suppressed it: it proved completely ineffective. Frustrated, he collected several blood samples and sent them to the lab to try and discover if it was based on any substance known that he could try to counteract; in the meantime, he started infusing fluids through IV route, appalled at how badly dehydrated and starved Kirk was, which of course didn’t help getting the drug out of his system. Suddenly, the ship was tossed like a toy, sending McCoy and the nurses in all directions, and then the lights went all out.  
“What in the fucking hell is going on! Anybody hurt?”, McCoy asked. His nerves were dangerously edged by Kirk’s unrelenting screams and his critical condition: it seemed probable that they would end up having rescued him only to watch him die in agony onboard his own ship.  
“We are fine, Doctor”, one of the nurses answered, scrambling to her feet and offering a hand to McCoy, who took it and forced himself to stand up on shaky legs. He was relieved to observe that he was mostly undamaged, with the exception of several bruises already forming where he had connected with the floor. Before he finished checking on Kirk, who fortunately had been fastened to the biobed because of the convulsions agitating continually his limbs, the lights came back as the ship made one last, very delicate jerk. McCoy hit the communication button.  
“Sickbay to bridge”  
“Spock here. How is your patient?” An exceptionally loud howl gave an eloquent answer to the inquiry. “Doctor, can you not administer some medication to suppress the pain?”  
“Oh, how come I haven’t thought of this, Doctor Spock!” McCoy snapped angrily. “Maybe concentrate on your own job, will you? Why did you toss the ship like we were attacked by a bunch of angry Klingons?”  
“You have answered your own question”, Spock commented. “We were indeed attacked, by the Ve’llarrans. They managed to hit us with one shot of their plasma weapon. Our shields held, but a part of the energy managed to slip past them and disabled our warp core. Until Commander Scott repairs it, we will proceed to Earth with impulse speed, with the now disabled Shiner in tow. Is there something I can do for you? Should you not try and do something for your patient rather than busy yourself comming the bridge?”  
“Look, there’s some blasted alien drug in his veins, causing pain that is out of scale on our indicators. It suppresses any painkiller I could give him. I was wondering – maybe some of those Ve’llarrans we have in our brig could tell us how to get rid of it the fastest? Because if we wait for the lab results, I’ll have to put him on full life support: his heart won’t be able to take the strain much longer, and all his life readings are already completely erratic…”  
“All right, Doctor, I will question the Ve’llarrans immediately and communicate the answer to you as soon as I have learned it. Spock out.”  
McCoy was probably imagining it, but it seemed to him that there was relief in the way the Vulcan shut off the communication, and that wouldn’t be so surprising if it were true: the continuous screams were taking heavy toll on the doctor’s own emotional condition.  
“Jim, if you don’t stop making this noise, we will all end up silver-haired, not to mention, you will lose your voice”, he grumbled, taking some more readings with his scanner. As if on cue, the rest of Kirk’s strength seemed to have left him, and his screams became little more than a steady, silent moan. “That’s very kind of you to be such a cooperative patient,” McCoy continued his monologue, although he was sure that Kirk didn’t actually hear him. “Your shoulders will require thorough surgical reconstruction, but that’s out of the question until we get rid of this goddam drug and stabilize you a little… Let’s see about those gashes: they could definitely use a session with a regenerator… Why are they so inflamed? I don’t read any infection… Wait… no, that’s just too much! Seems like their claws secrete some sort of poison of their own… It won’t regenerate until we clean it off… But guess what, it won’t just be cleaned with water… Seems like the poison molecules have found some way to attach themselves to those of your body, and won’t let go…” McCoy sat back for a moment, totally frustrated. He was about to comm Spock and ask him to find out about chemical composition of the substance in Ve’llarran claws as well, but sudden silence attracted his attention. He bent over Kirk again and noticed that the pain indicator dropped a little, and the captain, after one long sigh, was finally able to give in to the long desired darkness. The scanner confirmed that the drug had indeed been washed off the captain’s bloodstream, and McCoy was grateful for small mercies. However, Kirk’s blood pressure, heartrate and brainwaves readings were still completely erratic, his limbs continuing to jerk randomly, and the doctor had to suspect some more permanent damage to the nerves and to some of the internal organs. For the time being, he decided to let his patient rest and limit his interventions to further rehydration and careful monitoring: attempting anything more invasive before Kirk woke up seemed risky, especially that McCoy was deeply troubled by the empty, unrecognizing look in his captain’s eyes before he passed out. Half an hour later, the communication buzzed, interrupting the doctor’s grim musings.  
“Spock to sickbay.”  
“McCoy here,” he answered wearily.  
“I managed to establish that the substance injected in the captain’s veins was al’thregllwn. The computer does not offer any translation into Standard, but the closest phonetic approximation would be altren. It’s a substance previously unknown outside of Ve’llarr, and the questioned Ve’llarrans have no idea about how to counteract its effects on a human, but they are confident it causes no damage other than pain that will disappear once the drug wears off naturally. And since pain is merely a thing of the mind, it does not seem to be a life threatening condition…”  
McCoy sneered at the last remark, but he said only:  
“If you can free yourself and have questions about Jim’s condition, you can come down to sickbay and I’ll debrief you the best I can.”  
“Understood, Doctor. As soon as I possibly can, I will leave the conn to Lieutenant Sulu and do as you suggest. Spock out.”  
It was another hour before Spock stepped in the doctor’s office. They locked gazes during a long moment, and Spock found the gloom in the McCoy’s stare very disquieting. He sat down across the desk and took the clipboard the doctor handed him, rapidly reading the report.  
“None of the injuries you listed here seem critical to me, yet you seem very upset. Explain”, he said as he finished reading. He raised his eyebrows when instead of complying with the simple request, the doctor had a spell of dark, bitter laughter.  
“Why, Spock, of course I’m upset. During seven entire days, they tortured the crap out of him. But to you, of course, that’s nothing to worry about, because pain is merely a thing of the mind and you imagine that it can be controlled…”  
“I realize, Doctor, that at some levels of intensity it cannot, especially by a non-Vulcan”, Spock cut him off. “I merely meant that, while the captain’s suffering causes me deep displeasure, I do not think it should prove fatal to him.”  
“Displeasure, hm? Then you should understand that I’m upset. But that’s not all, Spock. They obviously used also some other form of torture, some energy shocks, that wreaked complete havoc with his nervous system. There is also some damage to the brain, so subtle that I have no idea how to repair it or whether it even can be repaired. This, combined with the fact that enduring such pain for so long is very often simply impossible for a… mere human, makes me seriously worry about his mind’s condition when he wakes up. In other words, I’m not sure if he retained his sanity, and if he didn’t, I’m not sure if it can be helped. In fact I’m pretty sure he didn’t, and it most probably can’t. What I mean to say is that those blasted scoundrels tortured him out of his mind. You decide whether this is enough reason to be upset. For a mere human, of course, I don’t expect a green-blooded computer to feel compassion for someone weak enough to lose his mind under torture.”  
Spock stood up, and McCoy noticed he was shaking a little. His face was less impassive than a moment ago, uncovering some of the “deep displeasure” he had mentioned, looking more like genuine pain.  
“Doctor, as long as this diagnosis is not final, I simply prefer not to contemplate such possibility and wait until you are certain”, Spock said in a slightly trembling voice. McCoy felt suddenly very ashamed for having taken his frustration and despair out on the Vulcan. “As for the other things you said…”  
“I’m sorry, Spock’, the doctor cut in, also getting up and coming closer. “I was mean to you merely because I needed a way to ease the feelings of concern, despair, and anger. I didn’t mean what I said. I know you care about Jim. I’m… I’m just so furious I could explode. But not with you, Spock, you know it… Are you furious, too?”  
“Affirmative”, the Vulcan slowly replied. “When you asked me to question the Ve’llarrans, I did not actually ask them questions. I… extracted the answers directly from their minds. I also believe I made them feel my anger directly.”  
“Oh, Spock… I’m so sorry”, the doctor repeated, now angry also at himself. He didn’t condemn the Vulcan’s action in the slightest, but he was aware that Spock himself was or would eventually be experiencing guilt over it, because an unconsented mental contact was considered a serious offence on Vulcan. “Come, let’s go check on Jim. I believe you haven’t yet paid him a visit.”  
The Vulcan tensed perceptibly, but replied in an even voice:  
“Indeed. I was busy with organizing the best possible control of the Shiner. They have, after all, a crew of 200 telepaths… And with our warp core disabled, it may take us as long as a month to get to Earth, unless Commander Scott manages to repair it earlier.”  
They walked over to Kirk’s biobed. Although the captain was unconscious, his face presented a desolating spectacle: very pale, thin, bruised and scratched, with black circles around the eyes and long deep lines betraying excessive suffering. McCoy observed out of the corner of his eye deep sadness in “green-blooded computer’s” face, and felt even more guilty.  
“My urgent tasks have been taken care of by now, Doctor”, Spock finally spoke. “I believe I could sit here and wait for the captain to wake up.” And then we will know, McCoy thought.  
“By all means”, he said. “I’m not going anywhere either.” However, as soon as he sank in a chair at the opposite side of Kirk’s bed, he felt his eyelids becoming strangely heavy, and he was asleep in minutes, exhaustion with extreme emotions of the past day finally getting to him. And it was just as well that he managed to get some rest, because Kirk was to be unconscious for another ten hours. And when he would wake up, there would be little rest for the doctor.

Ambassador Na’mhanwr walked up to the brig slowly but confidently. Most of the Shi’nw’aer’s crew were being held on the Ve’llarran ship, restrained by force fields and guarded by Starfleet security officers, but Captain A’pwyllh and her closest assistant, E’llamrst, were kept in the Enterprise brig by precaution. Na’mhanwr was still shocked from what she had seen from the Enterprise bridge, before the Shi’nw’aer’s shields were disabled. Never in her life had she seen a sentient creature of any species treated as cruelly as A’pwyllh had treated the alien captain. It was not the mere sight of his bruised and bloodied body, or E’llamrst tearing his flesh apart and eating it in front of his crew that nauseated and revolted her: the Ve’llarrans always had their meals raw and bloody, and occasionally even enjoyed their food still alive. But that was precisely the scary part: their prey were animals, creatures of lesser intelligence, little or no awareness, no imagination, no capacity for meaningful interpretation or recreation of the world… Seeing a fully rational, emotional being very akin to herself treated like he was merely prey – worse than prey, because food never got tortured on purpose, only used as sustenance – had been a shock to Na’mhanwr. She could only imagine how the aliens on the Enterprise bridge must have felt when they saw one of their own race, their friend, their leader, shrieking insanely with agony, dragged through the floor by his hair, and then… The amount of empathic pain that she felt for him and his crew, as well as the sheer disgust and shame that she experienced were overwhelming. She instantly imagined that the aliens, the humans, must now hate and fear all Ve’llarrans, after witnessing such horrendous behavior perpetrated by them on one of their own. She was surprised when one of the bridge crew, a sweet dark-skinned communications officer, rushed to her attempting to help, supporting her, whispering soothing words into her ears. She felt defiled, desecrated by A’pwyllh’s actions, and was surprised that the Enterprise crew didn’t seem to notice it and still treated her in a friendly manner, just like before. When they finally disabled the Shi’nw’aer’s shields and transported all the people from her bridge to the Enterprise, a battle began. The Federation ship began its attack very cautiously, mindful of 200 lives aboard the enemy ship, but the Shi’nw’aer, although deprived of her leaders, threw all that she had in one, desperate attack. Most of the plasma burst that hit the Enterprise was deflected or absorbed by the shields, but some sort of impulse managed to pass through, wreaking havoc with the Enterprise power systems. Before they could reload their phasers and attack again, Acting Captain Spock asked the ambassador if she agreed for them to attack the Shi’nw’aer more aggressively, and if she wouldn’t treat it as a Federation attack on Ve’llarr. At that moment, she had serious trouble answering in Standard, she was so frightened, disgusted and confused that she only mumbled her agreement in Ve’llarran, to which Lieutenant Uhura reacted instantly, translating her answer to the Vulcan, and the phasers were fired immediately. Fortunately, the humans managed to disable the Ve’llarran ship without completely destroying it, only targeting its engines and weapon arrays. The few casualties who suffered some injuries due to the explosions in engineering section were permitted to be treated by the Ve’llarran doctors and no one was immediately punished in any way, just safely confined to a limited area, while Na’mhanwr had almost expected that everybody, possibly including herself, would be graced with a session on the shocking chair, and perhaps also beaten, cut and injected with the al’thregllwn. But that was not the Federation way: she should have learned it by this moment, but somehow she still couldn’t believe it. It seemed to her like the humans were mocking some very basic laws of Universe by refraining from immediately punishing such a crime. In theory, she knew there was to be a trial, most probably followed by a punishment, but she didn’t fully understand why this was necessary: A’pwyllh’s guilt was obvious, as well as the harm she had caused and her intention to cause more harm. Anyway, Na’mhanwr knew that she needed to speak to A’pwyllh personally before potentially confronting her on the trial, in front of all the aliens who would no doubt attend as judges, prosecutors, spectators.  
“Excuse me. I’d like to speak to the prisoner”, Na’mhanwr told the security officer who was guarding A’pwyllh’s cell.  
“Of course, Ambassador, you are clear to talk to her, but I have to ask you to follow certain security rules”, the officer explained. “You can’t cross the force field, you must speak in Standard or permit us to use the universal translator, and you can’t communicate telepathically. Your conversation will be recorded and, if necessary, used in court or in front of the Council during diplomatic proceedings.”  
“I understand and I intend to follow protocol”, the ambassador answered. The guard motioned for her to advance, and Na’mhanwr approached the transparent force field, behind which she spotted A’pwyllh sitting curled on her cot, her shoulders slumped in defeat, staring numbly ahead. The captain noticed the ambassador, rose and approached the force field to face her, and some of her sadness gave way to anger, projected around in this spontaneous telepathic way that, Na’mhanwr hoped, wasn’t comprised in the official defense for them to use telepathy during this contact.  
“So, it seems like you will have it your way”, A’pwyllh said. Na’mhanwr sensed disdain, anger, apprehension, sense of defeat. “Tell me one thing: how did you know the Shi’nw’aer’s shield frequency?”  
“When we left Earth, Starfleet initiated a wide search for those of your crew who had decided not to take part in your crimes and had remained on the planet. One of your former engineers contacted them, and they forwarded his insights to us via a subspace message”, Na’mhanwr explained with fake gentleness, but she hoped the answer would hurt A’pwyllh. “He told us that he suspected you were about to commit some act of sabotage, and seemed quite sorry he hadn’t contacted us a little earlier. But fortunately, he knew this key piece of information that gave the Enterprise the edge and permitted her to save her captain’s life… although they aren’t sure about his mind.”  
“He’ll never recover!”, A’pwyllh commented with perverse satisfaction that chilled the ambassador to the bones. Satisfaction that was somewhat of an act, at least partially, because next to A’pwyllh’s bitter vengefulness there was also some regret: after all, torturing a sentient being into losing their mind never comes easy to anyone; even less to a Ve’llarran. “I was too gentle. I should have known to deal with the unconvinced crew in another manner than just leaving them behind… I guess I thought too highly of them, after all: didn’t suspect them of being such ridiculous disloyal traitors!” Her bitterness was even more acute as she continued: “Well, fortunately for you, Na’mhanwr, I don’t think this little incident will have any influence on your beloved treaty. The Federation people aren’t vengeful: I don’t think they will extend punishment for my actions to Ve’llarrans other than me and my crew. That wouldn’t do the trick for them, would it? To compromise this treaty they so look forward to, just to be able to ravage and destroy our planet... But I don’t understand those humans’ present actions. They tell me my crew are all right, as am I, for the time being. It makes no sense to me, Na’mhanwr. Why do they drag us back to Earth since they could execute us easily here and now? They could even use my disciplining instruments if they don’t have their own: the chair and the al’thregllwn would do as fine against us as they did against the human captain… What do they hope to accomplish by dragging us to their world? What is a trial? What do they wish to try if they already know all the facts? They will still punish us, right? Put us all to death? Or just torture us, since they managed to save their little human captain from death?”  
“Why, A’pwyllh?”, Na’mhanwr asked, ignoring the other woman’s questions that she didn’t know how to answer anyway. “What did these people ever do to you?”  
“I’m surprised you ask”, A’pwyllh answered coldly. “I tried to do it by the book, Na’mhanwr, you can’t deny I did. I tried to convince you personally. I wrote countless letters to the Council. I spoke up in person in front of them, quoting bare facts… But they never listened! All I said was lost in this unbearable babble of friendship, progress, mutual enrichment… Freely expressed consent… How can the Ve’llarrans consent to something that has already been imposed upon them? Respecting every world, every way of life… Can’t you see it, Na’mhanwr? They have already destroyed crucial aspects of our way of life! Our faith, for one thing! So, their very existence, the absurd multitude of worlds proved that Ve’llarr is not the center of Universe! And there is no Spirit anywhere to be found, other worlds don’t know him, so why believe in him anymore? Why waste time for creating art, music, poetry to honor the Spirit when we can instead adore the Federation? Only, Na’mhanwr, the Federation has not yet found cure for death. Where will a Ve’llarran’s soul go when they die? To one of the Federation planets, to be satiated eternally by what? By friendship, progress and cheap technologies?”  
“There is no answer to these questions, but the Federation people never denied our right to believe what we believed… They never imposed…”  
“But, they didn’t have to! With travels, technologies, cheep fun galore, who would bother about the Spirit? But one day the Ve’llarrans will ask what happened to their souls, where they will go after they die… What will you tell them then, Na’mhanwr? Because by then there will be nothing, not a thing left of our faith! Nothing! So little is left already, and we have only known the Federation for several years… Can’t you see it? With our faith, we lost our traditions, our art, our identity…”  
“If the Spirit is nowhere to be found, then maybe believing in him was a mistake from the beginning?”, Na’mhanwr retorted weakly.  
“Yes, maybe”, A’pwyllh conceded. “But it was our way, and we were happy with it. Our world was ordered in a certain manner. Now this order is being destroyed, and I can’t see how friendship and mutual enrichment with other worlds, other orders can replace it. Before we know it, we’ll be eating cooked food or maybe even plomeek soup… We will play guitars and pianos instead of ta’kssennr, we will think the night is only good for sleeping, and of course the Federation will claim it has always respected and valued all of our customs…”  
“All right, A’pwyllh, so you’re hostile to any change…”  
“Not to any change, but to change imposed from outside, that doesn’t match our own rhythm, that… cuts our wings, a second time.”  
“I understand. You don’t want progress. You’re afraid to lose too much. Our point of view differs, but I can see that yours is not as absurd as I once felt. But just tell me this: how could you harm an innocent person like this? A person who never even was in Ve’llarr? Or take part in negotiations?...”  
“That question is quite easy”, A’pwyllh shrugged. “I would do it many times over, to him and his entire crew, and pay the price of enduring the same torment, if I knew it could help Ve’llarr remain what it is, happy and independent. I think Captain Kirk would understand me. He was, after all, ready to sacrifice himself and his first officer to keep his oath to Starfleet… I did what I had to, and I lost.”  
“You made the Ve’llarrans look like disgusting barbarians who can eat a sentient being alive…”  
“Oh, don’t exaggerate, we didn’t eat anyone alive… We merely took a few bites. And believe me, Na’mhanwr, it was worth the trouble: he was really tasty… You should ask one of them, maybe they’ll let you at least drink a few drops of their blood… You might come to like it…”  
Shrinking in disgust, hardly able to refrain from sobbing in reaction to this cold, almost alien cruelty that she now sensed from A’pwyllh, Na’mhanwr withdrew, leaving her compatriot to her dark musings. Her thoughts were chaos: was she guilty of what had been done to the human? Was she guilty of betraying the Federation? More importantly, were her actions betraying Ve’llarr?... Was she guilty of suffering of many Ve’llarrans, or maybe worse? Had she failed everyone?...

When Kirk stirred, moaned, then opened his eyes, the pain indicator shot upwards about three fourth of the scale, but McCoy decided to try and assess his mental condition prior to giving him any medication, most of which caused some disorientation or stupor as side effects. Since Kirk didn’t make any movement that would permit him to take in his surroundings, instead staring absently at the ceiling, McCoy moved to place himself in Kirk’s line of vision.  
“Hello there, sleeping beauty”, he said. “You’re safe, Jim. You’re aboard the Enterprise. We rescued you…”  
The reaction was not at all what McCoy had wished. Kirk started screaming and trashing, to the point of making it necessary to restrain him before he injured his ruined shoulders any more, to which he opposed some weak but desperate struggle.  
“No, no! Let me go! Let me go! Stop this!”  
“It’s only us, Jim. You’re safe”, McCoy said in a reassuring tone, but it was obvious from Kirk’s lack of reaction that he didn’t even hear him, let alone understand and believe. He continued screaming and struggling until exhaustion, but then, after a moment’s rest, staring ahead with some particularly intense anguish in his wide open, hazel eyes, he started pleading again:  
“No, no, not Spock! Do what you want with me, but let Spock go! You can’t! Leave him alone! Please! Please! I beg you! Let him go! Spock! Spock! No! Nooooooooooooo!”  
“I am here, Jim, and I am unharmed”, Spock said, bending over Kirk and taking his hand, but the captain didn’t seem to notice him at all.  
“For goodness’ sake! What is that about? Why is he talking about you, Spock? You weren’t there with him, on the Shiner…”, McCoy, slightly confused, turned to the Vulcan for an explanation. He noticed that Spock was staring at the screaming captain with a strange look in his face, but he snapped out of his thoughts to supply the missing information:  
“Onboard the Shiner, they have impressive holoprojecting technology. When I read Appel’s mind, I learned that they made Jim believe that I was tortured and… well… eaten alive in front of him. It must have been… traumatizing.”  
“You don’t say! God, what else did those feathered demons do to him?”, McCoy asked rhetorically, lifting his hand to his eyes and cutting himself from the upsetting view that his obviously terrorized captain was offering at the moment.  
“This is irrelevant. The important thing is, when will he stop living in this torment that his mind apparently keeps showing him, and come back to reality?”  
“There’s no way of knowing. Maybe in five minutes, maybe tomorrow, maybe never”, McCoy answered bluntly. But he knew very well that he wouldn’t be able to assist at the horrendous spectacle of Kirk’s hallucinations even one more day. Fortunately, in Kirk’s condition, reliving the emotional horror, screaming and trashing was exhausting, and after about fifteen minutes he gave up all activity, only two or three tears ran down his cheeks.  
“Doctor McCoy…”, he whispered after a moment, and McCoy leaned over him, taking his hand and answering, full of sudden hope:  
“Yes, Jim, I’m here, I’m listening…”  
“I’m sorry, Doctor… I’m so sorry…”  
“Sorry for what?”  
“I swear I never wanted to tell them… I tried, I really tried to resist… They must have read my mind, but… that doesn’t justify me… You’re quite right to hate me, you know… I also do.”  
“Now, what the hell are you talking about again?!”  
“I don’t deserve mercy – my ship, my crew, killed because of me, but… I just can’t stand the pain any more… You were once my friend… I don’t deserve… Please, a last favor…”  
Since the pain indicator was indeed very high and Kirk had many injuries susceptible of causing him considerable discomfort, McCoy, without giving it too much thought, took a hypo loaded with a strong painkiller and pressed it against Kirk’s neck. His patient blinked and one more tear fell from his eye and rolled down his cheek and into the pillow. Then, he closed his eyes and stopped moving altogether, stopped breathing, his heart stopped beating…  
“What the hell!”, McCoy exclaimed panicked. “Full life support! Now! Quickly!”, he yelled at the nurses, grabbing a manual defibrillator and applying a shock to bring the heartbeat back. He was successful; however, after less than three seconds, the heartbeat disappeared again. Fortunately, in the meantime the more sophisticated life support systems were ready, and Kirk was attached to a machine that breathed and pumped his blood for him.  
“What… what the hell has just happened?” From a strictly medical standpoint, Kirk’s sudden death made completely no sense.  
“I believe I have a theory, Doctor”, Spock answered. The doctor had almost forgotten that the Vulcan was still there.  
“I don’t remember when you got your degree in medicine, but go on, I’ll welcome any idea…”  
“I believe that the captain was not really communicating with you, but with some illusion of Doctor McCoy, who told him he had betrayed his ship and the Ve’llarrans had destroyed it. When he asked for the last favor to relieve his pain, I do not think he meant a painkiller.”  
“He meant for me to kill him”, McCoy put the missing elements together, horrified. “And, stupid as I am, with my hypo, I gave his mind a reason to believe that it could free itself from the pain… permanently.”  
“Indeed, Doctor. I think Jim’s mind chooses to believe that he is dead – and without the life support, he would be.”  
“Yes, Spock, but… the life support will not bring his mind back! If he really believes he’s dead… with you eaten alive, his crew all dead, me hating him, and himself a traitor, then he will never choose to come back! My God, Spock, what have I done! I literally killed him…”  
“It was not your fault, Doctor”, Spock answered rather matter-of-factly. “But, unless something is done, I do believe the outcome is as you stated.”  
“But what can we do? We couldn’t get through to him even when he was conscious, and now?... Spock! You must meld with him! It’s the only way! Show him you’re alive and well: when he feels you inside his mind, he MUST believe you!”  
“Indeed, Doctor, I fail to see another possible course of action”, the Vulcan acknowledged, and McCoy was briefly surprised that he had even considered any other course of action, or that he hadn’t proposed the meld himself. There was a certain almost imperceptible reluctance in Spock, but he conquered it in a matter of seconds and, slowly maneuvering between the tubes and cables of the life support, he positioned his hand on Kirk’s face and intoned the meld sequence.  
Spock found himself surrounded by total emptiness, much as if he were trying to meld with an inanimate object or, which came down to the same, a dead body. There was simply no mind for him to meld with, no presence to contact, no thoughts, emotions or images to cling to, only infinite, motionless whiteness of death. But Spock knew Kirk wasn’t dead: his body continued its work, relying on the machines, and his mind had been there mere minutes ago, so it couldn’t have travelled too far.  
//Jim! It’s me! It’s Spock! I’m here, with you. I’m alive and well. I need to speak to you. I need to hear you, to see you. Please, Jim, respond. Remember me.// He flooded Kirk’s empty mind with their common memories, fragments of missions, games of chess, idle conversations at the mess hall… It wasn’t empty anymore, filled now with Spock’s projections, but Spock knew they were relevant to Kirk as well, cherished by the human as much as by himself, and he hoped they would constitute enough appeal for him to bring his tortured mind back where it belonged. Indeed, he didn’t have to wait all that long.  
//Spock? Is it you? Have I joined you in heaven?//  
//Please, Jim, the suggestion is childish. I am very well alive and unharmed, I am in your mind now. I am gratified that you recognized me.//  
//Of course I did. But… this is wrong. I saw you die. I remember every detail of your execution…//  
//The Ve’llarrans tricked you, Jim. It was merely a holoprojection of me.//  
//But… it’s impossible! I would have known!//  
//You were tortured into half-consciousness. Besides, they took the image of me directly from your mind, therefore my simulacrum looked and behaved precisely as you expected the real me to look and behave. It was impossible for you to see through the trick. But you must know I’m speaking the truth now… You must come back. Your ship is safe, and Doctor McCoy is sick with worry for you. I’m here with you right now, Jim…//  
//But… but… I saw you die…//  
And then it suddenly hit Spock: Kirk’s most terrifying memory from the Shi’nw’aer. Pain and dizziness from the shocking chair, agony of the stretched and torn muscles, all his body aching and sore, A’pwyllh’s horrifying threats, pronounced with cold mocking cruelty, and then Spock’s own figure dragged to the room, tortured, destroyed… Kirk screaming, trashing against the rope, begging for mercy, crying… Spock found himself completely paralyzed by the intensity of Kirk’s emotion, flooding him, submerging him, choking him like few other things ever had before. Fear, despair, grief, guilt, horror, helplessness, disgust, anger, pain, desolating vision of the solitude to come, lacerating knowledge of Kirk’s own part in trapping Spock, acute awareness of the tremendous value of this life that was being snatched away in front of his very eyes… And Spock was incapable of not adding his own emotions to the picture: horror at his captain’s agony and humiliation, blind fury against those who caused it, and there was something more, even darker, even more unsettling… Suddenly Spock noticed that his friend’s mind, freshly retrieved from grim depths of catatonia, now tortured again by the relived memory, scared away by the additional burden of Spock’s emotions, was about to withdraw again, and this time Spock knew luring it back would be even harder, if not altogether impossible. With tremendous effort, he managed to shield his feelings, block them from his own awareness and thus, also from the meld. Only remained Kirk’s horrendous memories from the Shi’nw’aer, but Spock guarded himself well from observing them too closely anymore. He dismissed them as no longer real, and with all the force of his half Vulcan mind he projected reassurance and care.  
//All this is finished, Jim. You are now safe, onboard your ship, with your friends who want you back, who need you back. Your entire crew needs you back. I… need you back.//  
//You wouldn’t lie to me, Spock, would you?//  
//Never, Jim. It’s safe for you to come back, I promise.//  
At this, reasonably sure that the captain was convinced, Spock withdrew from the contact. He found out he was all shaking, his face was covered with sweat, his strength abandoned him and he would have slipped from the chair to the floor, if Doctor McCoy hadn’t supported him by the arm, leaning over him with concern.  
“What’s wrong, Spock? You look terrible… Your readings are off! I wanted to stop this, you looked so pained, but I feared to completely cross out Kirk’s chances. Are you all right?”  
“Yes, Doctor, just exhausted.” And shocked, but shock is a thing of the mind and can be controlled. At least for the moment, I need to control it. “I do not need for you to cling to my arm like that, thank you. And… I believe it worked.”  
As if on cue, Kirk stirred and moaned, and opened his eyes slowly.  
“Doctor McCoy? Spock?”, he asked with a somewhat shaky, hoarse voice.  
“We are here, Jim. It’s okay, you’re safe”, McCoy answered, letting go of Spock and turning immediately to the captain. “Just take it easy, okay? Don’t try to move your arms. Don’t move at all if you don’t have to. But don’t forget to breathe: playing this trick on me once a day is sufficient, all right Jim?”  
“All right, Doctor, I suppose”, Kirk answered with a shadow of a smile.  
“What is it with this ‘Doctor’ thing? What the hell happened to my nickname?”, McCoy asked. The answer didn’t fail to startle him.  
“You told me not to use it…”  
McCoy stared at him with a pained expression. Kirk scanned him for a certain time, frowning on the contradiction between what he remembered and the fact that he was on the Enterprise, obviously undamaged, among his very alive and healthy crew. He tried to shrug, regretted it, looked Spock in the eyes and finally concluded:  
“I guess it was one of the Ve’llarrans’ tricks… I thought you came to me, told me that my ship with her crew was gone because of the secrets I betrayed, and to punish me, you injected me with more of this awful stuff…”  
“Now listen, Jim”, McCoy said, dead serious, looking Kirk straight in the eyes and pressing a hand against his unscratched cheek. “I would never, never ever say or do such a thing to you, do you understand? Half the things they did to you would be sufficient for most people to betray their own mother. Even if you had told them everything you know, I would never hate you, understand? Nor would I inject you or anyone else with this hellish invention that almost killed you in my own sickbay. Do you understand, Jim?”  
“I do”, Kirk agreed. “At that moment, though, it all seemed to make sense…”  
“That doesn’t surprise me. You were completely dazed with the pain, physical and emotional… Do you realize that a few moments ago, you actually asked me to kill you? And flatlined when I pressed a painkiller into your system? Fortunately, this Vulcan friend of yours was here, and went to search for your mind and drag it back from the limbo, like a green-blooded Orpheus. Lucky to have him, aren’t we?”  
“Yes”, Kirk whispered. “Spock… thank you, Spock. For bringing me back, and… for being alive.” The last, emotion-filled words were barely audible, but Spock with his Vulcan hearing caught them well.  
“You are welcome for my melding with you, Jim, but your gratitude for the other fact you mentioned is illogical. Since you were the only one captured by the Ve’llarrans, my health was never in any danger. However, to humor you, I may thank you back, for the same. Now, if you will excuse me, I believe I require a short period of meditation, after which I will head directly to the bridge, where I have somewhat neglected my duties.”  
“Rest well, Spock”, Kirk told him and tried to extend his arm to squeeze the Vulcan’s hand, as if he wanted to make sure that his friend was really there, but the only response he got from his limb was a sharp stab of pain. Spock only nodded and retired hastily, as if his need for meditation were more urgent than he had told them. 

At the beginning of what was to be a long and tedious mending and convalescence period, Kirk hardly ever said anything, completely lost in his thoughts. Sometimes, he was haunted by horrible flashbacks of his seven days on the Shi’nw’aer, and then McCoy would shake him or call him by the name, unable to bear looking at the pained or terrorized expression in the captain’s face. Kirk would never talk about anything that had been done to him, and McCoy could only make his conclusions based on what he had understood from Kirk’s hallucinations, and on the telltale variety of injuries that he was stuck treating. His patient, unlike his ordinary self, was completely docile and compliant, submitting without a word even to painful or invasive ministrations, letting nurses undress, wash, dress and feed him without commenting, without making awkward jokes that had always been one of his ways of coping, without ever smiling or making eye contact. McCoy could only guess how much his dignity had suffered while he was beaten, torn and tortured, a completely helpless plaything in the hands of his captors, unable to control even the simplest functions of his own body, exposed to mocking gazes and cruel comments as he writhed in pain on the floor, sobbed, screamed or retched. McCoy desperately wanted him smiling, joking again, interested in the ship’s affairs again, or at least talking to him more openly, because this grim, passive silence was so completely unlike Kirk. There were also times, not so much better, when Kirk just relished the realization that what the cruel Ve’llarrans had made him believe proved to be only an illusion, and that he was still the captain of his ship, Spock was alive, his entire crew was unharmed, McCoy didn’t hate him, no information had been betrayed… In these moments, he felt overwhelmed with relief and outright happiness for just being back to his life, almost snatched from him, but he didn’t know that the absent, blissful expression that his face was wearing in these moments also caused McCoy pain if he spotted it, because no one should be deliberately pushed so close to losing everything they held dear.  
Besides, McCoy was generally tense and edgy with overwork: even having retrieved his mind, Kirk still continued to task him, and the very nature of his injuries constantly reminded the doctor of how they had been acquired, making his hair stand on his neck. The surgery on Kirk’s shoulders took several hours, and still McCoy was far from satisfied with the results: the bones had been realigned and remerged, the tendons, muscles and ligaments regenerated, but the damage had been so extensive that the repaired areas were still tender, weak, and practically useless. McCoy had to restrain Kirk’s arms against his body to prevent him from using them and wreaking havoc with the freshly regenerated tissue, but in this manner, he rendered the captain completely helpless, to be spoon-fed by the nurses, little indignity against which Kirk didn’t even struggle one tiny bit, which was almost the worst. A whole different story were the deep bloody gashes and wounds made by the Ve’llarrans’ claws, that just wouldn’t even start healing, regenerator or not. McCoy had some substantial quantity of the mysterious secretion forcibly extracted from the imprisoned Ve’llarrans’ claws and thoroughly analyzed in the lab, but he learned nothing more than that the substance had been unknown outside of Ve’llarr, had an alien chemical composition, an unpronounceable Ve’llarran name, and was too tenacious to be washed away with conventional methods. Desperate to neutralize it, he even contemplated removing surrounding tissue, thus hopefully getting rid of the substance mechanically, but the first principle of every physician being “primum non nocere”, he was reluctant to such radical intrusion, especially that he didn’t know how deep this blasted poison was nested and dreaded making the wounds worse while remaining unable to heal them. In the meantime, he had tried applying to them all sorts of soothing balms known in the galaxy, learning by heart their precise shape and location, including the horrifying, abstract drawing carved in Kirk’s back that he dared not try to analyze, but they still remained angrily inflamed, red and painful.  
And then, there was also the damage done to Kirk’s nervous system and to some of his internal organs, most notably his heart. His life readings were still far from perfect, although they seemed to be slowly improving, and he was threatened by arrythmia or even a cardiac arrest at any moment, making it hard for McCoy to sleep at night. His damaged nerves caused his muscles to contract randomly in the least appropriate moments, bringing pain and distress and reminding him constantly of his ordeal. The feeling in his hands, fingers and toes was noticeably decreased, and his motor skills, seriously handicapped: if he tried to eat his soup himself, he wouldn’t be able to find his mouth with his spoon. McCoy hoped the problem would pass eventually, but he resented the feeling of helplessness that the lingering injuries elicited in him. He felt guilty, angry at himself, at the Ve’llarrans, and even at Kirk, for not healing better, for being quiet and subdued rather than his ordinary restless self, fussing to be released from sickbay before any injury he might have even started healing. There was also one other thing that had McCoy worried: Spock. Since his lifesaving mind meld with Kirk, he never again showed in sickbay even for a minute, while McCoy had expected him to hover and obstruct the staff’s work all the time outside of his shifts, even at night, and to try his utmost possible to comfort the obviously still suffering Kirk. This flagrant absence was so troubling that, after a day, McCoy walked over to the bridge and asked Spock why he didn’t care to pay his captain a little visit, but he was told harshly to take over captaining two ships for him so that he could waste his time in sickbay. McCoy was so shocked by this reply that he didn’t even manage any smartass answer: since when, indeed, had caring for Kirk become a waste of time for Spock? He returned to sickbay more worried than he had left it, but never spoke to anyone, least of all to Kirk, about this conversation with Spock. Kirk, on the other hand, never asked about Spock, but sometimes his eyes lingered on the door, and the disappointment when it whooshed open only to admit someone else, while not shouted out loud, was nonetheless impossible to miss.  
Despite all the setbacks, Kirk was making remarkable progress recovering. McCoy even noticed that he was making some efforts to cheer up a little, which was more than he would dare ask of a person who had just been through such traumatizing captivity. Finally, three days after Kirk retrieved his mind from his self-imposed limbo, McCoy finally got a taste of what he had wished for – the captain’s more ordinary self.  
“Bones!” The nickname, although pronounced with a hint of impatience, sounded very good to the doctor’s ears. “Can’t you finally free my arms from this freaking straightjacket you’d put them in? It’s been two days since the surgery, they must be all regenerated ten times over…”  
“Since when have you been a doctor, Jim?”, McCoy snapped, the edge lifted from his voice by his hidden delight at having been given a chance to argue. “The new tissue is still very tender, and if you start leaning on your arms with all your weight, shifting heavy stuff, or hugging the nurses, you will soon need another surgery.”  
“Oh come on, you know I won’t do these things… maybe with the exception of the latter.” McCoy chuckled gratefully at Kirk’s good-natured walking into his trap. “I promise to be good. I’d just like to be able to do basic stuff, like, you know, eat by myself, or use the communicator…”  
“Oh?” The doctor lifted his eyebrows questioningly, but he slowly proceeded to disentangle Kirk’s arms from the restraints. He was confident that if the captain didn’t strain them, they should be healed sufficiently for cautious functioning. “Who would you like to comm?”  
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the bridge?”  
“The bridge! You’re still off duty, you realize that. The captain’s stuff must wait another week or two.” Or three.  
“It’s been three days, Bones. Three days since the mind meld and he hasn’t once showed up.”  
“What do you mean, Jim…”  
“Oh, cut it off. You know very well who I’m talking about. Spock. He hasn’t visited me even once.”  
“Stretch your arms in front of yourself, slowly. Does this hurt?”  
“No… not really. Well, a little.”  
“All right. To the sides now. Slowly. And up over your head.”  
“Ah… I can’t…”  
“Don’t worry. You’ve done very well, considering. You will soon recover your full range of motion, with some patience and some exercise. Just… don’t push yourself, that would just be counterproductive and end up having you back in restraints… Don’t lift things heavier than a spoonful of soup… Anyway, I’m not releasing you from sickbay yet, so I’ll be keeping an eye on you myself.”  
“Bones.”  
“Yes, Jim?”  
“You didn’t answer. About Spock.”  
“Oh, that. Give me a break, Jim, since when have I been his guardian angel? I suppose he’s busy, he’s running two ships now, and controlling two hundred telepathically gifted separatists isn’t an easy job…”  
McCoy gave Kirk the best explanation that he could muster, but that wasn’t what he really thought: Spock’s flagrant absence in sickbay worried him no less than it did Kirk.  
“You know, Bones, when we melded… I… I sensed something strange in him. A feeling… I couldn’t quite make sense of it, but it was very dark, and it frightened me… He suppressed it almost immediately, but… I’m afraid he was hurt in some manner.”  
“I’m sure he was”, McCoy answered dryly. “For goodness’ sake, he experienced first-handed the unbearable agony to which those feathered bastards had reduced you, while he understood his friend had actually endured it! For seven blasted days! He’s not used to emotions so strong, Jim. Maybe give him some time to sort it out.”  
“Maybe, Bones. But there was something… something different. I think I should talk to him. If he even wants to…”  
“It’s a bad idea, Jim. As a half-Vulcan, he has a lot of issues of his own. At present, you’re in no condition to try and solve someone else’s problems, as much as you might want to. Remember your strained heart… for all I know, you could end up having a cardiac arrest if you allow yourself to get too upset. I’m telling you this as a doctor.”  
“And as a friend?”  
“Well… I suppose at some point, you will have to talk to him”, McCoy admitted reluctantly. He was about to propose that he might try it first, but the intercom suddenly came to life with Uhura’s very urgent voice yelling:  
“Uhura to sickbay! Emergency! Ambassador Namar’s quarters, quickly!”  
“I’m coming!”, McCoy yelled back, and as he was grabbing the medikit, he asked wishing to get a better idea of what to toss inside: “What happened to her?”  
“She hanged herself. She’s not breathing. I can’t…”  
“All right, I’m coming!”  
McCoy stormed out of sickbay, his heart in his throat. As Chief Medical Officer of the Enterprise, he was responsible for the ambassador’s health, and as a trained psychiatrist, he should have noticed something was wrong. Of course, she was an alien, not exactly of a species he was specialized in, but… He knew that he had neglected everyone else, concentrating all his efforts on Kirk. Could he blame himself? Kirk was the only one visibly needing his attentions, and God, did he need them! But still, he felt not paying Namar any attention had been a serious mistake. So was ignoring Spock, he realized with a pang of guilt and apprehension. Jim spoke about a weird feeling in him, dark and frightening, other than just compassion and anger, which would be normal when you see your friend harmed… What the hell is this about? What if he needed help immediately, and I just let him be, because of course his famous efficiency is intact, he’s running everything and working two shifts like it was no effort at all, right after having witnessed his friend being torn apart, physically and emotionally? That’s a very Vulcan thing to do, but heck, he’s not even fully Vulcan…  
By the time McCoy arrived to Na’mhanwr’s quarters, Lieutenant Uhura had somehow managed to restore the Ve’llarran’s respiration, although how she did it, given that the conventional method was completely hindered by the Ambassador’s beak, was to remain unknown to McCoy. Fortunately, Uhura must have found Na’mhanwr pretty soon, because she seemed to be suffering of only slight hypoxia and McCoy was able to take care of it with his portable oxygen dispenser. The ambassador opened her eyes, and McCoy was hit by the intensity of her despair, projected all around without restraint. She started yelling something in Ve’llarran, but was calmed when Uhura threw her arms around her and hugged her, speaking soothingly:  
“It’s all right, Namar… You’re all right… We’ll sort it all out, you’ll see… Me’nnralw’annhn…”  
A broken sob got out of the Ve’llarran’s throat as she tried to speak to them in Standard, but failed. The rest of medical emergency team cannoned into the room with a stretcher, more equipment, and a lot of fuss. McCoy got up and ushered them outside: medically speaking, the situation was under control, and from a psychological point of view, the doctor suspected that his patient would prefer calm and privacy to a fussing crowd. He used the regenerator on the abused throat muscles, and was relieved that they weren’t in a very bad condition, either. He didn’t really know what to say. As a doctor, he needed to interview her, to know what he should note in his report, but he just couldn’t find proper words. Taking one’s own life was a serious taboo among humans, but how could he know how the Ve’llarrans regarded it? Was it considered a sin, honorable, desired, unforgivable? He had no idea. He shot Uhura a glance encouraging her to take over this ungrateful task, since it was obvious that she had formed some sort of friendly connection with the ambassador. The communications officer nodded to show that she had understood his intention, and asked Na’mhanwr with a pained voice:  
“Why, Namar? Why?”  
“Oh, you wouldn’t understand, beautiful Uhura”, the ambassador managed to choke out. McCoy handed her a plate of water that she licked, reluctantly at first, thirstily later.  
“Nothing of what happened on the Shiner was your fault, nor will anyone blame you or the Ve’llarrans in general”, Uhura said softly.  
“You can’t know that! Besides… what does it matter?... What I believed… my life.. our future…”  
“Your future can be anything you wish it to be”, Uhura offered, but the only reply were other incomprehensible chunks of phrases, cut by sobs. The door buzzed and McCoy cursed under his breath. Of course, across planets and cultures, despair and pain will always bring the curious to watch. He was prepared to give a speech about how sick people needed calm and silence to rest, but when he opened the door, his jaw fell as he saw Kirk, still wearing his sickbay gown and looking anxious and willing to help.  
“What the hell, Jim, why are you out of bed? How did you get here?”  
“Why, I walked, Doctor. My legs were not hurt, you know. How’s the ambassador?”  
“Physically, she is quite all right, but she seems really depressed. Come in, since you’re already here, you’re welcome to try your charms on her: whatever works. I’m clueless.”  
Kirk walked inside and approached Na’mhanwr with a look of concern and compassion on his face. The ambassador wanted to get up from the chair where Uhura had seated her, but Kirk motioned for her to remain seated, and sat next to her. Uhura gave him a delighted smile and briefly took his hand, squeezing it in hers, that Kirk gratefully squeezed back.  
“I’m James Kirk. I don’t believe we had a chance to talk before, Ambassador Namar”, he introduced himself.  
“No, Captain, I didn’t have the pleasure, but I remember you… from the viewscreen”, she answered, projecting pain and shame in quantities that would likely cause any other than James Kirk to withdraw.  
“I trust I look better now”, Kirk retorted, risking a cheeky smile. Na’mhanwr cast him a look, taking in the bloody gashes on his cheek, the shadows beneath his eyes, his thinness, his pallor unusual for a human, the uncontrollable twitches of his muscles, but she answered:  
“You do. Let me apologize to you officially…”  
“You have nothing to apologize for”, Kirk cut her off bluntly.  
“In the name of the planet Ve’llarr and her children, who only wanted to be friends with you bare-skinned outworlders, I apologize…”  
“But your planet has nothing to do with what happened to me”, Kirk answered confidently, “and there is no need for apology from you. From Captain Appel, I would be happy to hear one, but both you and the Ve’llarrans as a people are completely innocent in this matter.”  
“But, Captain”, she lifted a painful glance at him, “they ripped chunks of your body and ate them in front of you! When other Earthers learn that, they will never be able to trust a race capable of actually eating them…”  
“I don’t think I’ll tell them”, Kirk answered, but he was unable to suppress the shiver that ran through him at the reminder of the gruesome sight. The ambassador sensed it, and burst into sobs again:  
“How can you even be concerned about me, talk to me, after what the Ve’llarrans did to you?”, she choked out. Kirk leaned to be closer to her and took her arm. He spoke very firmly, with a persuasive inflection that many found irresistible:  
“Ambassador, if I were to stop talking to all races whose one or two members once harmed me in one way or another, I would have to stop talking altogether, and all particularly to humans. I have no hard feelings toward the Ve’llarrans whatsoever, and neither will other humans. I don’t even know how many of them will learn what happened here at all… In fact, for an act of terrorism, of desperation, Captain Appel’s action was pretty restrained: in the end, no one got really hurt, no ship was destroyed, it was an incident that we can easily make to look pretty innocent. On the other hand, if you, Ambassador Namar, chosen by your people to represent their planet, well known and liked by many humans from the broadcasts, were to take your own life… How do you imagine our relations would be after that? The Ve’llarrans would likely resent us, and the humans, while I’m sure they would mourn you, could wonder why you felt so much responsibility…”  
“Do you mean that I made it even worse?”, the fear he sensed from Na’mhanwr made Kirk retreat immediately:  
“No, you DID not make it worse, but if you had been successful, I doubt it would have helped… Besides…” Kirk couldn’t resist the temptation to stroke the soft, fluffy feathers surrounding her face, although he barely felt anything at the touch, “it would have been such a shame! To throw your life away, and why? Nothing really happened after all… Some crazy separatists tried to do evil things, but with your kind help, my crew stopped them before they managed to really hurt anyone… And it was no responsibility of you or Ve’llarran authorities, and will not alter the course of the negotiations… What is there to make you despair?...”  
“I’m puzzled, Captain, that you insist that no one was hurt”, she answered quietly. Kirk shrugged and hissed, immediately regretting the movement, and blushing slightly as McCoy glared at him. “I wish I could do something for you…”, Na’mhanwr added.  
“Well, you can. Promise me you’ll never attempt anything like that again, and that you’ll stop worrying.”  
“I can promise you the former thing”, she said seriously.  
“I guess that will have to be enough… Although I’d really like to see you happy”, he answered, gracing her with his most winning smile and patting the feathers between her wings. She couldn’t resist the fervent entreaty and projected some joy in his direction: the equivalent of a furtive smile. “I also wondered… But perhaps I should ask the separatists.”  
“About what? I’ll help if I can, Captain.”  
“Well, it’s nothing really important, just… curiosity.”  
“Please, go on.”  
“I had the impression that the Ve’llarran who… errr… scratched my back didn’t do it randomly, but made it to be a drawing. I wondered if what he drew was supposed to have any significance…”  
“Perhaps. Art is rarely insignificant. Can I see it?”  
“I don’t recommend it”, McCoy suddenly intervened. “It still looks rather messy, you know… But I agree it’s some sort of representation, I just never managed to make anything out of it… But if you handle me a clipboard, I believe I can sketch the shape faithfully: I’ve seen only too much of it.”  
Uhura extended said device to McCoy, and he busied himself at it for several minutes before he handed it over to the others. It contained a drawing of two twin shapes, ovals with pointed endings at the bottom, filled with spiraling lines and smaller ovals turned in all directions.  
“Yes, I recognize this pattern”, Na’mhanwr stated with a sigh. “They are wings, symbol of Ve’llarr Independent. It is widely recognized by Ve’llarran scientists that we initially had wings – real, big wings well capable of taking us up in the air and cross significant distances – but when our life developed mostly bound to the ground, enclosed in shelters, then buildings and cities, they became a burden to us, and gradually atrophied into the useless little ornaments we now have. A’pwyllh and her followers selected wings as their symbol because they speak of Ve’llarrans’ past, indicating how different we once were from most Federation races, proudly conquering the skies, free and invincible, our bodies caressed by the wind as we travelled across the air.”  
“I see”, Kirk answered, hypnotized by the explanation. “Well, then I guess there’s one thing I should thank them for: for once, I have a pair of wings of my own!”, he joked awkwardly. Uhura chuckled to humor him, McCoy scowled at him, but the ambassador looked at him seriously and answered:  
“This is not true, Captain… You do have real wings. This ship, the friends who love you, the ideas that you live by… No one has, or needs, better wings.”  
“Thank you, Ambassador”, Kirk answered, moved.  
“I think you’re due back in sickbay, Jim”, McCoy blurted out, spoiling the mood. “Your biobed must be missing you by now. I need to take a few readings on you. Ambassador, if you’ll excuse us…”  
“Of course. Thank you, and I’m sorry for the trouble…”  
“No trouble. And I thank you, it was an honor and a pleasure to meet you”, Kirk told her. At this very moment, the door buzzed again, and McCoy, who was the first to answer it, found himself face to face with Spock, looking the closest to gloomy that his Vulcan mask of indifference permitted him to look.  
“How is it possible, Doctor, that the acting captain is not informed…?” He cut off brusquely, noticing Kirk approaching from behind McCoy. “Captain Kirk”, he acknowledged him stiffly. “Ambassador Namar, Lieutenant Uhura… I believe that the situation has been solved, as you seem unharmed.”  
“Indeed, Captain Spock, and I’m most grateful”, Na’mhanwr answered, and after a short goodbye, the three men left, leaving the ambassador in Bantu officer’s company.  
“Doctor, I expect to receive a full report of this incident”, Spock told McCoy harshly, “especially about its causes, as well as about the reasons for which the Chief Medical Officer had no idea that the ship’s guest of honor was experiencing difficulties adapting to the situation…”  
“It wasn’t McCoy’s fault”, Kirk stepped in.  
“I was not speaking to you, Captain”, Spock answered unruffled, “and I do not remember having been informed that you have been cleared for duty, or released from sickbay.”  
The sudden coldness in the corridor chilled McCoy to the bones, and Kirk seemed all but shocked by Spock’s apparently neutral, yet sensibly hostile tone.  
“I wasn’t on duty, it was a private visit”, Kirk retorted when he gathered his wits, pulling at his sickbay gown, the absence of uniform the best confirmation of his words. “One of which I’ve been expecting from you for the last three days”, he added quieter, his voice a little more bitter than he intended. “Let’s talk, Spock”, he added in a softer tone.  
“As you are certainly aware, I have been acting captain of the Enterprise as well as the officer in charge of the Shiner that we have in tow, and her crew. However, I understand that you may wish to talk to me. I as well have several things to say to you. Doctor McCoy, examine your patient and if you can assure that he is stable, I will proceed to the conversation that must not be delayed any further. I will join you in sickbay in thirty seven minutes, if that seems convenient.”  
For a moment, Spock waited for an answer, but both other officers were too shocked to give him any, so he just turned on his heel and left hastily. Once in his quarters, he grabbed the clipboard that he needed for his announced conversation with the captain. Seeing Kirk shook him more than he had expected: recovered enough to be walking around the ship, yet so pale and vulnerable, with those awful gashes still marring his face: what was McCoy doing anyway? Spock had hoped to postpone the talk to the last possible moment before reaching Earth, so that he could leave for good without giving Kirk any chance to stop him, but Kirk’s condition seemed sufficiently improved to permit the conversation, and he had no real pretext for delaying it further, nor could he simply avoid the captain aboard the ship: Kirk had enough of his strength back to track him down, maybe corner him in his own quarters… Sickbay was better, more neutral, and gave Spock the liberty of leaving as soon as he said what he needed to say. Of course, he anticipated that Kirk would resist his resignation, would try many things to convince him to stay, but Spock knew he had to remain firm, for Kirk’s own good. At the anticipation of possible protests, of all the sneaky, emotion-based arguments Kirk could oppose to Spock’s immovable logic, the Vulcan felt a pang of anxiety: he was aware that a large part of him – a more selfish part – would wish to fall straight into Kirk’s rhetoric traps and would love nothing more than to be convinced by him to stay, but Spock knew that he had to resist this part of himself, resist at all costs, find a way to shut Kirk’s mouth, if necessary, to prevent him from appealing to this human, selfish, illogical part that would wish to stay. If the cost was to be blunt with Kirk, to lie to him, maybe even to hurt him, then that was what he had to do.

McCoy took Kirk directly to sickbay and examined him hastily, to fit in the thirty seven minutes allowed by Spock. All the captain’s current readings were satisfactorily stable, although still far from normal, but both men were anxious about Spock’s behavior.  
“I have hardly ever seen him so hostile, although I do much to mess with him, and certainly not toward you!”, McCoy offered, aware that Kirk had to be thinking the same thing anyway. “I’d say something’s seriously wrong. Listen, Jim, whatever he tells you, you mustn’t take it too literally. He’s in a strange state of mind, I think what happened to you on the Shiner shocked him more than he’s willing to admit, even to himself. He will probably try to pull the wool over your eyes with some ‘Vulcans don’t have feelings’ kind of bullshit, but you’ll know better than believe it, won’t you? Anyway, you know him best, and you’ll probably know to handle him better than I would. Just… take it easy, okay? You’re still very far from recovered, and I’m not talking only about your neurological problems… You realize that a trauma like the one you’ve been subjected to must have left deep psychological wounds: you are vulnerable now, and you can’t take it upon yourself to…”  
“Bones”, Kirk finally cut him off, “you’re making it sound like Spock means to harm me. I think he has been hurt, and of course I’m willing to help him, even if it implies talking about what happened to me on the Shiner. You know I’m thinking of it all the time anyway…”, he added quietly. McCoy wanted to say something, but had only time to lightly put his hand on Kirk’s shoulder in a gesture of reassurance before Spock entered sickbay, his face unreadable, his stance stiff and his hands clasped around a clipboard.  
“Doctor McCoy”, he said without undue hedging, “could you leave us to discuss a matter of some importance? It will not take more than fifteen minutes to discuss. Then I shall return your patient to you.”  
“Stop being ridiculous, Spock”, McCoy snorted at him. “You know you can talk to Jim any time you like, the past three days having been no exception… but since you were too busy, you’re welcome to talk to him now. Just don’t upset him, he’s been through a lot recently, as you’re aware yourself”, the Doctor added, glaring at him.  
“I will simply say what I have to say, and Captain Kirk’s emotional reaction is his own responsibility”, Spock answered smoothly, earning another glare from McCoy who opened his mouth to say something, but before he spoke, Kirk told him:  
“Leave us already, Bones. No need for further delay” – and so he left. If Kirk was afraid there would be awkward silence, he was wrong; nor did he have any time to begin the conversation himself, or to say anything to make the atmosphere between them any better. He flinched inwardly at the dry, cold tone that Spock used to tell him brusquely:  
“Captain, I merely wanted to present you my resignation. I no longer wish to serve in Starfleet. As soon as we reach Earth – which, unless Commander Scott manages to fix the warp drive, will take approximately three weeks and four days – I intend to find transportation to Vulcan. If you wish, you may advise Starfleet to find you a replacement science officer…”  
“I’ll do no such thing”, Kirk cut in, fairly surprised, carelessly tossing the clipboard presented to him to the biobed. “Whatever the reason, now is not the time to make such a decision…”  
“Captain!”, Spock interrupted him urgently. His tone was suddenly no longer cold: it was fervent, almost pleading. “There on the Shiner, I proved to be a liability to you. It was me, the fear for my life, that made you vulnerable. Seeing me die… hurt you. If I stay, you might one day be hurt that way again… I have always endeavored to be an asset to you, and will not bear to be your weakness.”  
“Spock!” Kirk’s hazel eyes opened wide and round in surprise. “What you are saying makes no sense! You are not my weakness, that’s you who brought me back to life! If it weren’t for you, I would be dead now…”  
“And why would you be dead? You chose to die, Jim! There was no lethal injury, but you asked Doctor McCoy to kill you, and although he merely tried to anesthetize you, you chose to believe that you were, indeed, dead. Because of me… because you believed you had lost me!...”  
“Look, I can’t deny that seeing you devoured alive by the Ve’llarrans felt like hell”, Kirk answered failing miserably to repress shivers wracking him at the recollection, “but Spock, if they had done the same thing to another person close to me, to McCoy, to Scotty, to Uhura, to a relative, do you think it would have been easy? It’s perfectly normal for a human to form attachments with other people… If you view this as a vulnerability, you imply that people should be lonely and unhappy all their lives, just to avoid potential hurt…”  
“But it is not the same, Jim. I saw what it did to you. They broke you, Captain.”  
“What do you mean: they broke me?”, Kirk asked him, paling, vainly struggling against twitches repeatedly convulsing his limbs. “I didn’t tell them anything, even though I desperately wished I could save you…”  
“You cannot deny it! I saw it in your mind!” Spock was speaking so intensely that, although his voice was level, it felt almost like he was yelling. “You were broken. You relinquished your sanity, your very life… The fact that they had not enough talent to extract Starfleet secrets from your shattered mind was not your merit, merely their lack of experience…”  
Kirk paled a tone more, and was now so white that it was almost grotesque, especially in contrast with the angry red gashes on his cheek and deep black circles beneath his eyes. Was he being accused of having betrayed his oath by letting his sanity snap in front of a bunch of hostile telepaths? Did he really betray it? Did he compromise his own ship’s safety? Did he jeopardize what was dearer than life to him? Could he have prevented it?  
“It wasn’t like this”, he whispered defensively, a hint of uncertainty coloring the tone of his voice. “After I thought they killed you, I was tortured for days before I finally lost my mind… Maybe for a Vulcan this stuff they injected me with would be a mere thing of the mind, to be easily controlled, but to me it felt like my body was burning inside and out… Like my blood was on fire, like my insides were full of liquid fire!” The recollection, along with the accusations, exhausted Kirk. He suddenly wished to put an end to this discussion. “You are wrong, Spock, you are not my weakness. I will never support your resignation on such ground. If Starfleet Command releases you, it will be against my firm and eloquent protest.”  
“Very well, Captain.” Spock turned to face Kirk, his eyes and voice ice again, formal again, the first name tellingly dropped. “If this motive for my resignation seems insufficient to you, then I will give you another one, my… er… true motive. I wished to spare you pain, but obviously you need do hear it all.”  
Kirk sat heavily on the biobed, his respiration suddenly hindered, his chest aching. He was terrified like a child waiting for a reprimand, seeing their parent angry although not yet understanding why. But since the punishment was severe – Spock’s resignation – he knew that the crime must have also been serious.  
“I could take no more orders from you, Captain”, Spock continued, looking slightly to the side from Kirk’s face. “I disdain you. I had admired you as a strong, resilient person and a capable leader, but seeing you humiliate yourself in front of the Ve’llarran separatists… begging for mercy, crying… You cried like a baby, Captain… A Vulcan would never behave this way, even if his entire family was being murdered in front of him! Neither should a starship captain. Nothing can justify it. I disdain you, and will never be able to respect you again. Will you now approve of my resignation, or will you force me to expose my reasons to Starfleet Command?”  
Although admittedly, Kirk had been expecting Spock to say something hurtful, he had not anticipated anything even remotely as cruel and ruthless as this expression of utter contempt. Maybe if he had been fully fit and alert, he would have been able to see through the act, or at least to react with disbelief, or anger. Maybe he would have been able to see the almost unbearable pain deep in Spock’s eyes, masked with stubborn determination and a lot of long practiced skill. But as he was now, exhausted by his ordeal, still in pain, still haunted by the horrors he had endured, he was only able to take Spock’s merciless words like as many daggers stabbing into his very soul. As he felt his heart being smashed to dust, his body started reacting as well: there was a blinding explosion in his head, his chest felt like it was being crushed, and breathing required heroic effort.  
“Spock… You can’t… I didn’t…”, was all he was able to offer by way of defense. Spock’s accusation had hit a spot that was already very sore, although Kirk hadn’t had the courage to speak of it with anyone: having been so helpless and broken in front of hostile, mocking creatures left him feeling miserable and despicable. It was only too easy to believe that Spock was right.  
“Will you approve of my resignation, or will you further embarrass yourself, as well as me, by begging me to stay?”, the heartless question was a coup de grâce. Kirk nodded and, with a very last effort, choked out:  
“I… will… approve…”, to which Spock answered:  
“Very well”, and left sickbay hastily, almost as if he was being chased. In the door, he collided with nurse Christine Chapel, who was staring at him with a horrified look suggesting that she might have overheard something. Ignoring her, Spock just pushed past her, eyes locked steadily ahead, movements stiff and almost clumsy. After recovering from the initial shock, Chapel rushed to Kirk, now slumped on his biobed, gasping for air and barely conscious, readings on the monitor above completely wild.  
“Doctor McCoy! Doctor McCoy!” she yelled even as she prepared a hypo of acetylsalicylic acid. McCoy immediately left his office and ran wildly to Kirk’s side, scanned him rapidly and concluded he was beginning to have a cardiac arrest. Fortunately, with medication delivered immediately, his condition was stabilized within a few moments.  
“What the hell happened?”, McCoy asked Chapel, as Kirk was now unconscious, but he had a fair dose of certainty that the dreaded conversation with Spock caused the stress that hindered the functioning of Kirk’s heart, still very weak after Ve’llarran tortures. Then he noticed the clipboard, and just glancing at it he understood it was Spock’s resignation. “What is this green-blooded hobgoblin up to now?”, he asked. “Dammit, he’s a fine officer, but going into cardiac arrest because he wants to quit?”  
“I… I believe it’s not all, Leonard”, Chapel told him. He spared her a more attentive glance and saw how shaken she was. Certainly not because of the medical emergency, which was pretty much of the routine kind for trained medical staff.  
“What do you mean, Chris?”  
“I… overheard the last fragment of the captain’s conversation with Spock”, she said, looking guilty.  
“Let’s say, then, that I overheard it too. Come on, Chris, tell me, I’m his fucking doctor, I need to know what put him in this state…”  
“Spock… he told the captain he disdained him, and was unable to respect him anymore, or serve with him anymore…”, Chapel uttered reluctantly, as if she didn’t believe it herself.  
“You’re making this up!”, McCoy answered, taken completely by surprise, his eyebrows shooting almost out of his forehead. He’d expected many things, but never this.  
“Leonard! You know I wouldn’t”, Chapel scolded him, and McCoy suddenly realized that of all people, Chapel would never ever invent anything like this. It was true, then. He felt a surge of anger such that it almost blinded him, causing his fists to clench to the point of making his nails dig painfully into his palms, his jaw set so firmly it hurt.  
“This… green-blooded bastard”, he finally managed to spit out. “I’ll talk to him… I’ll tell all the things that he should have heard from me long ago!” He turned to Chapel, his blue eyes throwing fiery sparks to the point of making her recede half a step. “You stay with the captain, comm me if anything’s wrong with his readings. Don’t leave him even if the ship blows up, do you understand?”  
“Doctor, I don’t think you should go talk to Spock in your present condition”, Chapel told him hesitantly. “You should calm down first…”  
“The hell I will!” McCoy swung his fist and crashed it into the biobed next to Kirk’s foot, missing it by centimeters, avoiding bruising himself only because the bed was soft. “I’ve had enough dealing with this heartless Vulcan…”  
“Doctor, we don’t know the full situation… I merely overheard a chunk of a longer exchange…”, Chapel tried once more toning his anger down a little.  
“I’ll be damned if I need to know anything more than the chunk you overheard, and the state it put Jim into! You have your orders, and I need to attend to an urgent matter…”  
After that, McCoy stormed out of sickbay with one last glance at Kirk’s silent form, now at least breathing evenly, but visibly pained even in unconsciousness. When he reached Spock’s quarters, he didn’t even bother buzzing the door, but used his medical override straight away.  
“Doctor! I have not called for medical aid!”, Spock told him, getting up from behind his desk in surprise.  
“I’m well aware of this”, McCoy answered angrily, leaning against the desk with his face aggressively close to the Vulcan’s. “But guess what! I have legitimate reason to be here, as you have just made another person urgently need medical aid!”  
“What are you referring to, Doctor?”  
“You know damn well, you pointy-eared son of a bitch! What you told Kirk put him into fucking cardiac arrest!”  
“Is he well?”, Spock asked, paling a tone, anxiety showing in his voice just a little.  
“Well?! Do you fucking know what you’re asking about? You just told him you disdain him, and you’re asking if he’s well? Don’t look at me like this, I just overheard the last bit of your conversation… When I got to him, he was hardly able to breathe! Are you proud of yourself? What is this fucking about, anyway? You disdain him, because what? Because he wasn’t able to stand torture as impassively as a Vulcan would? Did he betray any information? Will you explain it to me, or you disdain me as well, because I’m a human and have feelings?”  
“Doctor”, Spock answered wearily, facing McCoy with some strange sadness written in his eyes, “calm down and remember you are speaking to your commanding officer. I do not intend to explain anything to you. If you can, please find comfort in the thought that after we reach Earth, you will no longer be exposed to my presence. I have resigned from Starfleet.”  
“Some consolation! So you insult Jim mere three days after he came back from hell, then leave him without a chance for him to make it right… You’re the most pathetic excuse for a friend this world has ever seen…” He was throwing words out at Spock with fury and disgust, his eyes still in flames, and it was visible that he was putting much effort into refraining from dealing Spock a physical blow.  
“I have heard enough, Doctor. Now, leave my quarters and be aware that abusing the medical override on the lock is an offence…”  
“I am aware of this. Too bad disdaining your commanding officer, who had almost fucking died defending the Federation secrets, is not an offence… Don’t worry, I was leaving anyway. I don’t want anything to do with you anymore… not ever! Don’t show your sorry ass in sickbay or I’ll throw you out”, McCoy concluded, helpless threats feeling like the only way to get at least some of his anger out. Before he left, he suddenly turned back to Spock and spat in front of his feet, satisfied at the sadness that marred the dark alien eyes. Let him court martial me, if he wants. After what he just did to Kirk, everything is possible. And of course he wouldn’t tell me what it was about, McCoy thought with the slightest pang of guilt experienced at the thought that maybe the Vulcan would have been more willing to offer an explanation if he hadn’t yelled at him from the beginning. However, at the thought of the wounded, tormented Kirk, whom Spock’s words had put back to the biobed, his guilt relented immediately.

Kirk only woke up the next morning, thanks to a sedative McCoy injected him with when he started to stir earlier. He was feeling awful, but that was his new normal since the Ve’llarran incident. It took several moments of unpleasant disorientation to recognize a new source of pain somewhere deep inside him, a more insidious but more relentless one than the inflamed gashes all over his body or his newly regenerated, oversensitive shoulders. He pushed himself up on the bed, but before he had time to jump down from it, McCoy came running to his side.  
“Oh, that’s just great you’re awake. I might have exaggerated a little with sedatives last night. I thought you needed good rest: do you realize you had a cardiac arrest?”  
“I do now”, Kirk answered, remembering vaguely the pain in the chest and the choking feeling before he lost consciousness.  
“And I had told you to take it easy! You’re a nightmare of a patient: never respecting your doctor’s orders… How do you feel?” McCoy was trying to be funny, but his heart just wasn’t in it. He felt upset, looked upset and sounded upset. And upsetting.  
“Fine. I feel fine”, was the usual answer.  
“Like hell you do”, McCoy mumbled. “Just look at the pain indicator on the scanner…”  
“Bones?”  
“Yes, Jim?”  
“May I ask you a favor?”  
“Doctors don’t do favors. But… you can always ask, Jim. I’ll do what I can.”  
“Can you discharge me from here? I won’t do anything untoward. I’ll just go to my quarters and stay put. I’d like to be alone for a little while, and in sickbay there’s always somebody around: nurses, patients, visitors… doctors…”  
“I see your point, Jim. But no. You just had a cardiac arrest, and I’m still in the woods with your neurological problems caused by this blasted shocking chair. It could happen again any moment.”  
“Bones, please…”  
“No, Jim. The answer is no. Not immediately, anyway. Not after what happened to the ambassador…” McCoy surprised himself by letting slip the last part. He would think it, perhaps, but say it aloud? God, he was really exhausted, and the constant emotional strain was definitely taking its toll on him. Kirk opened his eyes wide in surprise.  
“What do you mean? You don’t think I’d like to kill myself, do you? Because I wouldn’t.” The protest, although welcome, sounded strangely flat, and McCoy felt the hair on his neck rise at the realization that this was precisely what he had been thinking. Emergency, Doctor. The captain’s quarters. We have just cut the rope but he wasn’t breathing, he imagined, and felt a cold shudder run down his spine. He locked gazes with Kirk a few seconds and was appalled when the captain averted his look.  
“For goodness’ sake, Jim! Talk to me!”, he yelled. “Listen, I overheard a bit of what this green-blooded excuse for a first officer told you…”  
“Bones!”  
“Jim, I know that you’re hurt! Anyone would be, if their best friend treated them like this… I don’t know why he said what he said, but it was the most absurd, inhuman and mistaken thing he ever said, and heaven be witness there was enough competition…”  
“Enough, Bones! I won’t listen to this!” McCoy was surprised by how angry Kirk sounded. Well, he always had whenever someone had attacked Spock, but this time McCoy hoped he would actually be angry against the Vulcan. That he wasn’t was a very bad sign from a psychological point of view. “Leave me alone! If you won’t release me from here, at least do me a favor and let me be on my own! I don’t know what you heard, but I will not discuss it with you.” The captain’s face was briefly covered with a red flush, that immediately disappeared leaving it all pale again, but McCoy wondered if he hadn’t inadvertently further humiliated his friend by admitting to knowing what the conversation had been about, even though he had clearly indicated whose side he was on. He berated himself mentally and promised himself to be more tactful.  
“All right, Jim”, he said soothingly. “I’ll give you a painkiller and I’ll go to my office to finish my reports…”  
“I don’t want a painkiller”, Kirk protested. “I feel fine.”  
“Oh, come on, who do you want to fool? The monitor doesn’t lie, and you’re way in too much pain…”  
“I just don’t want it. You can’t force me if I refuse medication…”  
“Well, Captain, that’s where you’re wrong. I’m the doctor here, and I won’t have you transform my sickbay into a fucking medieval torture chamber…” Even as he spoke, McCoy wondered why Kirk resisted a painkiller, while he had been extremely grateful for them in the days following his rescue from the Shi’nw’aer. The only logical answer came as a cruel shock. So, it was easier to suffer pain from the still unhealed injuries than the pain inflicted by Spock’s merciless words; and probably Kirk just hoped the former would distract him at least a little from the latter. It most likely wouldn’t, but how was McCoy supposed to help him any, if he continued to oppose and fight him? He softened his tone of voice and followed as gently as he could: “I won’t force you, Jim, it's as you wish. I’ll leave you if you really prefer me to go. But if you change your mind – about the meds or about company – I’m right there in my office, okay? Any time you need me, you just come over, call my name, or press the button and I’m there for you.”  
“Thanks, Bones”, Kirk answered in a calmer voice, with a hint of relief, but the sadness wasn’t gone. McCoy felt like choking Spock, like slapping his face or at least verbally assaulting him again, but even as much was impossible: the acting captain would be on the bridge now.  
When McCoy finally walked away, Kirk was free to give in to his gloomy thoughts, from which the pain of the burning wounds was only a very weak, but still welcome, distraction. The sound of Spock’s words echoed in his brain, causing him to physically wince and quiver as if the words were Ve’llarran poisonous claws, ripping him apart again: “they broke you”, “was not your merit”, “I disdain you”, “you cried like a baby”, “a Vulcan would have never”, “never be able to respect you again”… He tried to find some rational explanation why Spock would treat him like that, but the more he thought about it, the clearer it became to him that there was only one possible explanation: he was despicable. It had to be true, because Spock had seen his very mind, Spock who was always kind, always accurate, and who for no possible reason in universe would lie to him maliciously, in order to hurt him. He could probably lie to protect him – he had tried, when he first handed his resignation, but Kirk couldn’t accept such a naïve lie as a reason to let Spock go, could he? So he was told the truth, and for the first time in his life, he almost regretted he hadn’t contented himself with the lie. All that Spock told him was strictly conform to reality: yes, he did believe all the Ve’llarrans’ vile and cruel manipulations, he did break, he did lose his mind, leaving it potentially open for the telepaths to take out all the important information it was holding. He also cried, screamed, begged for Spock’s life, and was too desperate to even realize how humiliating it was, to whine for mercy in front of creatures who relished his every moan. He remembered that, when Spock melded with him to bring him back from the deathlike coma, when he saw Kirk’s memory of his captivity, aside from compassion, horror and anger he projected also another feeling, a dark and frightening one, one that Kirk had never felt from him and therefore, didn’t recognize, but it had to be this: disdain. Spock had suppressed it and still had managed to pull Kirk back, it had still felt like he cared, but it was logical, too: he wouldn’t wish him dead, even if he couldn’t respect him anymore. The awareness that Spock, this friend about whom he cared admittedly more than about anyone else, who had always been by his side and offered him his silent, infallible support, now wanted to abandon him, treated him so cruelly before he even fully recovered from horrific torture, judged him unworthy of his friendship and service, was so painful that Kirk bitterly regretted having permitted Spock to drag his mind back from the limbo.  
And yet, it wasn’t the only painful part, maybe even not the most painful. Kirk knew that if he wasn’t a good enough captain for Spock, then he wasn’t good enough for anyone. He never tolerated anything less than their best performance from others, but anything less than perfection from himself. On the Shi’nw’aer, when the unreal McCoy told him he had talked about the Enterprise’s specifications and caused her destruction, the deaths of the crew, it just finished breaking him, and although he didn’t remember betraying any information, he was too dazed by the pain to be able of rational thought. When he woke up in sickbay, after his imagined euthanasia, and learned that the Enterprise was fine, everyone was alive, the relief was so great that he didn’t spare much thought to how he had really behaved on the Shi’nw’aer. McCoy told him everybody considered him as a hero, because he hadn’t said anything despite all the atrocities he’d been subjected to, he hadn’t let the telepaths read relevant information from his mind even when he was tortured; to McCoy, it was hardly believable he could maintain mental shields even in the midst of such pain. But now, after what Spock told him, he realized that even finally losing his mind, after what was days of agony, meant exposing his ship to danger… So, his lack of strength did in the end compromise the safety of what he held the most dear. It all turned out all right, the Ve’llarrans being visibly not skilled enough telepaths to dig the information out of his shattered mind, but what if they had done it? He should have found a way to resist insanity longer, to endure the agony longer with full consciousness: his mind snapping didn’t really protect him from the continuing pain, did it? He just wasn’t able to understand anymore what was hurting him. In his self-recriminations Kirk forgot to invoke the obvious extenuating circumstance: maintaining his sanity any longer was just not possible for him, losing one’s mind under too much pain not being a thing that can be controlled by sheer willpower. Since Spock – his most loyal friend, who additionally was always right – had blamed him for his weakness, then he was to blame.  
He suddenly knew what he had to do. He hailed a nurse and asked her for a terminal with subspace connection, just so he could forward an urgent document to Starfleet Command. Since it didn’t interfere with his recovery in any way, the nurse was happy to comply with his request. Additionally, she noticed that he was long overdue for a painkiller, and administered one without asking for permission, and before Kirk had any chance to protest. Which was just as well: he needed a clear head to compose his own resignation. 

A day after her talk to Na’mhanwr, A’pwyllh woke up more tired and more disheartened than ever. She was being treated well, she had a bed and a sonic shower in her cell, she was fed regularly, but cold hatred and disdain in the eyes of the humans forced to interact with her, as well as being separated from her closest collaborator and partner, E’llamrst, were beginning to get to her. She dreaded to think about what was waiting for her in the end of the journey. Of course, she was ready to die, to suffer, if necessary, or to see all of her crew treated in the same manner. That had been an accepted risk from the beginning, although the disappointment of the failure was still bitter. Despite what she had told Na’mhanwr, she still didn’t completely give up hope that maybe the Council, upon reading reports about all the atrocities she had perpetrated against one of Starfleet officers, would still deem Ve’llarr unworthy of joining, the Ve’llarrans as primitive, savage creatures capable of devouring a fellow sentient being alive. The thought that she might never see Ve’llarr again was still a little painful, although A’pwyllh knew she had nothing to return to, with her father having killed himself three years earlier, her mother having withdrawn to devote herself entirely to the Spirit, and her sister angry with the rest of the family and averse to all attempts at contact. Yet the planet itself was sorely missed. Paradoxically, A’pwyllh, the owner of one of the biggest and fastest ships ever to have left Ve’llarr’s modest shipyards, had always been romantically in love with her planet, appreciative of its unique beauty: glowing red sky of the day and deep navy blue sky of the night, bare mountains sparkling with crystals, purple rivers of warm, sweet water, lush, multicolor vegetations in the valleys, myriads of unique scents mingling in the fragrant air of the evenings, ancient chants praising the Spirit, always audible from somewhere, far or near, for there was always someone, day or night, who would call to their creator. Or more precisely, there had always been someone, as the chants, before as natural to hear as the leaves rustling in the wind, had gone on making themselves more and more scarce since the Federation had come to mingle with Ve’llarr those six years before. It wasn’t even that A’pwyllh herself was a fervent believer, the Spirit hadn’t been particularly important for her personally since she had grown up. But she had been one of the rare Ve’llarrans who had ventured into space as soon as the technology was sufficiently safe, and she had learned as one of the first that there were other planets, populated with sentient, intelligent, spiritual beings just like the Ve’llarrans. She just never deemed it necessary to make those contacts a wider knowledge. She traded some goods – mostly delicacies, jewelry, fabrics, stones, some harmless technologies – but was rarely interrogated too thoroughly about where those goods were coming from: the Ve’llarrans had never been a particularly curious race, and for the Spirit’s sake, did all the races have some obligation to be curious? But when A’pwyllh first intervened in front of the Council, she was too easy to dismiss: she was told that she only desired independence because she had a privileged position as one of very few individuals actually venturing to space, learning the truth, meeting other species. She protested that with all of the Federation open for free trade and other sorts of exchange her position as owner of a huge and fast ship was much better, but nobody would pay attention to her words.  
At the peripheries of her vision, A’pwyllh noticed that the guard in front of her cell was replaced by another, like every six hours. The new one was a young, blond-haired woman, probably pretty if one got used to these flat faces and featherless, translucent skin. She was carrying a plate with something looking exactly like… raw lo’kahrrh meat, a Ve’llarran delicacy, but A’pwyllh was at a loss as to explain where the security officer could have found one, or why she would feed her with a luxury dish. Speaking of why, she also noticed that the woman was smiling kindly, while the ordinary expression the humans wore in her vicinity was disgust or hatred. She got up and approached the forcefield curiously. The guard pushed a button opening a small window in the forcefield, through which she handed A’pwyllh the plate.  
“It’s replicated”, she explained, “but the molecular composition matches exactly that of an actual lokar, so the taste should also be pretty close.”  
A’pwyllh tasted the dish, and indeed, it was barely distinguishable from the real thing. There was some faint flatness about the flavor, the scent wasn’t quite as appealing as that of a living or freshly killed lo’kahrrh, but one could easily be fooled. The replicators, A’pwyllh thought with a sigh. One of the main reasons why the Ve’llarrans were so happy with their Federation guests. Who wouldn’t be, if they could suddenly eat flesh without hunting for it or breeding it, caring for it?  
“It’s good”, she commented only, half way through her meal, while the guard watched her eat without the habitual revulsion, if with a hint of curiosity. “Till now, I’ve only been fed with some shapeless and tasteless pulp. Why the difference?”  
“Today we are celebrating on the Enterprise”, the woman explained, blushing. “The captain has regained his senses and our CMO has officially declared him out of danger, if not fully recovered. I thought you would like to know.”  
“Good for him”, A’pwyllh only said, but against herself, she felt considerable relief – more, even joy – at the news. She had wanted to hate the blond-haired captain, representant of the pretentious organization that was presently destroying her world, and had pretended cold cruelty in front of the detested Ambassador Na’mhanwr, but she couldn’t repress the instinctive admiration she felt for his loyalty and courage.  
“You’re actually glad he’ll be okay!”, the pretty officer exclaimed happily. “You’re not completely evil, as some of us humans think… There must be some good in you. I haven’t met many Ve’llarrans, but the ones who came to the Enterprise with Ambassador Namar are all so adorable! I knew you couldn’t be…”  
“Listen, ah…”  
“Ensign Kasia Malik.”  
“Listen, Ensign Kasia Malik. Among humans, Vulcans, and other races there are those who are… adorable and those who are despicable. The Ve’llarrans are no exception. Personally, I definitely don’t think I’m among the adorable ones. But I’m not evil, of course. I was merely trying to defend what’s dear to me. I tried to do it in a nonviolent manner, but when I ran out of options, I hoped to shake your Federation in another way. But I guess I lost: if you come here bringing me treats and protesting I’m not evil, I’m afraid my cruelty will have proven insufficient to turn you people off of Ve’llarr…”  
“But why do you even want it? No one else than the Ve’llarrans themselves have solicited out increased presence in their world, in their lives…”  
“Your mere presence has already destroyed important parts of our way of life, of our core values… Do you realize that many Ve’llarrans lost their faith in the Spirit, many of them killing themselves or dying as the result of the sudden emptiness they felt? I presented data to the Council, but I was told there was no proof that it was contact with the Federation that caused the increased suicide rate… Correlation is no proof for causality, they said… Well, my father was one of those… data, and he had told me before he died just what was the reason for his choice.”  
“I’m… I’m sorry… I didn’t know…” Ensign Malik was looking at A’pwyllh with compassion. “But… I don’t really understand why the Ve’llarrans can’t continue believing in their… in the Spirit. The Vulcans, for example, never abandoned their beliefs, way of life, teachings…”  
“The Vulcans are a strong-minded, disciplined species. The Ve’llarrans are nothing like them: you must have seen before how emotional we are. If we were to live guarded, rational lives like the Vulcans, we would prefer to die… Humans, on the other hand, are chaotic, materialistic, and pretentious. If you think your Federation species don’t influence one another, you’re deluded. You have just accepted it, and I haven’t, that’s all.”  
“You know?”, Malik asked thoughtfully. “It makes me think of a period in Earth’s history… in 20th century, when humans invented means of fast travel around their own planet, as well as means of instantaneous, electronically mediated communication, people from different countries and cultures started mingling. At first, it did lead to a certain uniformization around the globe… the same espresso and burgers consumed in many places, at the expense of regional cuisines, the same trades, electronically diffused music, movies, even language… But after many painful lessons, humanity learned that their differences were a treasure to cherish and protect, and they did. I’ll give you my own example: I was born to a region historically called Poland, and raised bilingual – I speak my heritage language as well as Federation Standard. I know literatures, songs, and cuisines of many different cultures and planets, but I believe it to be my special responsibility to carry and pass on the most of my own… Also, on Earth, there are still religious faiths present, and some humans actually believe in a god not unlike your Spirit… Still create art, poetry, or music for his sake.”  
A'pwyllh listened to the ensign with polite interest, but parallelly, a different thought crossed her mind. The young woman, visibly delighted with the sound of her own words, seemed to have dropped her guard somewhat. Maybe there was a chance for A’pwyllh to try and reconquer some of her leverage? She doubted it she would be able to take over the Enterprise, or get to the Shi’nw’aer and free her crew, but maybe at least she could get E’llamrst out, and if she managed to steal a shuttle… that might give her at least a fighting chance. Very delicately, she probed Malik’s mind telepathically. She had, however, underestimated her interlocutor. The security officer sensed her efforts immediately, jumping back and aiming her phaser directly at A’pwyllh, although the forcefield was still intact between them.  
“So, that’s how you would pay me for my kindness?”, she exclaimed, bitter disappointment audible in her voice. “Don’t presume, Captain Appel! I know how to do my duty and I would never fail my ship and Captain Kirk!”  
“I see,” A’pwyllh calmly responded. “But can you blame me for trying? Would you not try anything to avoid torture and death, even if you had brought it on yourself?”  
“What?!”, Malik looked at her puzzled, lowering her weapon, and sighed. “Do you believe this is what awaits you on Earth? Torture and death?”  
“What else would it be?”, asked A’pwyllh, puzzled. “I tortured your captain, and if he survived, it wasn’t thanks to me…”  
“We don’t have such punishments in our law! At worst, you’ll be sent to spend several years in a penal colony, possibly compelled to perform some kind of task, but no physical harm will be done to you!” The ensign was trying to be soothing, and was very surprised when A’pwyllh reacted with downright outrage:  
“So you don’t value any order? Any justice? Your own officers’ life, health, wellbeing is worth completely nothing to you?!”  
“Well, we do, but… do you not believe in second chances? In mercy?”, Malik asked in return.  
“You see? That’s what I was talking about. We are different, fundamentally different, and you smug pretentious humans always believe your way of thinking is better. Mercy is important, and we always show it to strangers or random innocents in need of help. But what sense is there in being kind to a person who has deliberately hurt another? In Ve’llarr, if they learn you failed to punish my action, they will think that you don’t value the life, health and wellbeing of your own people, even important officers. If I had treated a Ve’llarran this way, there wouldn’t be any ‘trial’, and the only mercy I could hope for would be to die before they torture me all the same way as I did him…”  
“That’s really harsh, don’t you think? After all, you were defending your beliefs…” Malik didn’t really know what to tell her. She was convinced that mercy, or a chance at reintegration, was a much better form of justice than causing physical harm, but she was so taken aback by A’pwyllh’s resistance to a better future prospect that she couldn’t really find valid arguments.  
“I don’t know, Ensign Kasia Malik”, A’pwyllh told her. “On Ve’llarr, crimes against other people’s life or health are nearly inexistent. Can you say the same about Earth? If not, don’t you think that you should refrain from judging our way of seeing justice? Anyway, I’m done speaking to you. I’m tired, please leave me alone.”  
“All right. I didn’t mean to upset you. I thought you’d be happy to learn you won’t be executed… Maybe you are right. Maybe we don’t understand each other as well as I had assumed…”, said the ensign, returning to her post disheartened. 

The day proved much busier for McCoy than he had anticipated. His reports about Kirk’s condition were long finished and sent to Starfleet Command, who had been pretty impatient to get them, but he was wondering now if he shouldn’t update them adding clinical depression to the picture. He was so angry with Spock! After the horrendous ordeal of the Ve’llarran captivity, ordeal that left Kirk insane with pain, physically broken and emotionally traumatized, he was actually doing such a good job recovering! His mood was as stable as could be expected, flashbacks from the alien ship only tormented him occasionally, the physical injuries were manageable, it seemed like he would be fine, and then… then Spock suddenly dealt him a blow that could very well crush him even if he weren’t already half crushed from what had happened mere three days before. What McCoy couldn’t even begin to understand was why Spock would do such a thing to the captain. Was it something he saw in his mind during the meld that he found contemptible? But what could it possibly be? Kirk didn’t betray any information, didn’t dishonor the Federation in any way, and in an answer to his reports Starfleet Command even mentioned a possible decoration for his heroic resistance despite the atrocious treatment. What could it possibly be that Spock found so foul as to push him to abandoning and ruthlessly hurting his friend mere days after his rescue? Well, of course, there was one thing that all Vulcans found disgusting, and Spock even more than the others: emotion. McCoy didn’t have to guess what intense emotions Kirk must have displayed in the lifesaving meld: he had witnessed his anguish first-handed, when Kirk had screamed his throat hoarse during his hallucinations, begging the imagined Ve’llarrans to spare his friend’s life … But what monster would Spock have to be to hold this against Kirk? No, it had to be something else… but what? Hoping to find something that would permit him to ease Kirk’s hurt even a little, McCoy kept thinking about different aspects of this absurd situation, but he was unable to come up with any answer, and his heart kept bleeding for his friend’s torment.  
Unfortunately, he didn’t have all day for these laborious reflections. One unseasoned engineering ensign, while serving a shift on the Shi’nw’aer, made a false move on the Ve’llarran console, which exploded him straight in the face. McCoy operated on him for several hours, trying to save him from losing his sight, or having to rely on implants, nowhere as perfect as natural eyes. He was successful, and when he returned to his office to write a report about the situation, he was suddenly surprised to see Uhura’s face on his office terminal.  
“Doctor McCoy, there is an urgent subspace communication for you from Admiral Komack from Starfleet Command. Can I redirect him to your office?”  
“Yes, of course. What in blazes does he want with me?”, he asked dismayed, but Uhura’s face had already disappeared from the screen and was replaced by a frowning admiral. “Sir, how can I help you?”, McCoy asked.  
“Listen, Doctor. The matter is delicate… We have just received two rather strange requests. They’re both resignations from Starfleet: one is Commander Spock’s, approved by Captain Kirk, and the second is… Captain Kirk’s himself.”  
“Wait: what?!”, McCoy blinked in surprise. “Dammit! It’s worse than I thought! Who the hell gave him access to a terminal!”  
“Doctor? We are contacting you, because the justification for Kirk’s resignation is strange, to say the least. He accuses himself of having betrayed Starfleet’s trust, while all the reports we have received till now…”  
“Look, Admiral”, McCoy cut him off, jumping out of his chair and leaning into the screen. “You Starfleet Command just ignore these requests, all right? As I wrote in my reports, Captain Kirk was horribly harmed on the Shiner. When we retrieved him, he was completely insane, didn’t recognize any of us and asked me to kill him as a last mercy. To recover his mind, Commander Spock performed a Vulcan mind meld on him, but… I believe it influenced him somehow, hence his request. Both of them are… sane, technically speaking, but in a state of mind so fragilized that they can by no means commit themselves to such decisions.”  
“Your explanations are somewhat muddy, Doctor.”  
“I know. Listen, Admiral, don’t worry, I’ll fix this. Before we arrive to Earth, they’ll both be taking these resignations back. Just forget you ever received them.” I fucking hope I can fix this, or else I’ll just have to kick both their sorry asses, McCoy thought, now angry with both Spock and Kirk.  
“Well, I hope so, Doctor. We need Kirk in his right mind for the Ve’llarrans’ trial. With postponing the accession negotiations, there has been much rumor about the incident here on Earth, and we need Kirk’s cooperation to ensure that this irresponsible act of terrorism doesn’t turn into something bigger and uglier…”  
“I’ll see to it that they’re in their right minds again before the Enterprise trudges back to Earth”, McCoy promised again. Although if by Kirk’s cooperation you mean pretending that nothing happened, I fucking hope he won’t agree, he thought angrily. The admiral nodded and terminated the connection. Now you’ll hear a few words of truth, McCoy thought in Kirk’s direction, but then reconsidered. He had to handle this a little more subtly. He had already tried yelling, threats and insults with Spock, and it hadn’t worked. Besides, Kirk was obviously too hurt to be yelled at by the only one of his two best friends who hadn’t stabbed him in the back. He left his office and approached Kirk’s biobed. Kirk tried to smile at him in greeting, but the grimace he made instead was so pitiful that McCoy forgot his anger and felt his heart sink in his chest.  
“Jim…” He sat heavily on the edge of the bed and gently wrapped his hand around Kirk’s wrist. “Resignation from Starfleet? You? Really? And what do you intend to do with yourself, bury yourself in that Iowa farmhouse and become a peasant?”  
“I have no choice, Bones”, Kirk answered wearily, avoiding to look McCoy in the eyes. “If I’m not good enough to be Spock’s captain, then I can’t be anyone’s. I failed, Bones. I have no right to command people, send them, maybe, to their deaths, if I was myself unable to endure mere… several days of pain. I should have remained sane, and instead I left my mind unprotected, Starfleet’s secrets open for their telepathic attacks…”  
“You’re not making any sense, Jim”, McCoy stopped him, horrified. God, the guy should be proud of himself, should know he’s a real hero, whose resilience might have saved his ship, and instead he’s second-guessing himself… And he has his best friend to thank for it… McCoy felt anger rise in him again, but this time he decided not to let it get the better of him. “First, your ‘mere several days” were a full week of continuous torture of different kinds, some of which would have been sufficient to break or even to kill people less strong than you! Appel confessed that she had used the chair on you for three full hours, while she normally carries it around to discipline her crew, who are reduced to sobs after mere fifteen minutes! Second, losing one’s mind is not that person’s decision. You could have done nothing to prevent it, just as you could not have stopped yourself from dying if this hellish substance had stayed minutes longer in your system. Third, after you went bananas, all the information stored in your brain became a sort of… plomeek soup, if you will: everything mashed and scattered around, completely irretrievable even for a freaking Vulcan, unless they brought your mind back first, but then… you could reestablish your mental blocks, and protect your secrets. They were safe with you, Jim, like with any Vulcan. Or safer.”  
“But… Spock said that they could have picked the information after I snapped…”  
“Well, I’m happy to assure you Spock was wrong. Or, more likely, he lied to you.”  
“What are you trying to say?”, Kirk frowned dangerously.  
“I don’t believe he disdains you at all, Jim”, McCoy offered gently, with a reassuring smile. “Just think of it; he’s a creature of logic. Rationally, there was nothing revolting or contemptible in what you did, on the contrary, you were being your ordinary heroic self all the way.”  
“You’re wrong! He said it was unworthy of a captain to beg for mercy, to… to cry… He said I’d cried like a baby…”  
“Well now, Jim, you have only proven my point”, McCoy cut in less gently. God! Whatever Spock’s real reasons, humiliating a person because they were moved by your apparent death is just… too low a blow. You better have a really good reason for this, or else… “He MUST have been lying, because no rational person in their right mind would base their accusations on normal physiological reactions such as tears.”  
“But he couldn’t lie to me, Bones! Why would he? Vulcans don’t lie… In the meld, he told me he would never lie to me… Although…”  
“Yes?”  
“He did lie, initially. He wanted to spare me humiliation, because he was my friend…” Some friend, McCoy thought bitterly. “He said he wanted to resign because he saw he was a liability to me… my weakness, he said. Because I suffered when I saw him die… But I couldn’t accept such nonsense, Bones: it’s only normal to suffer when they torture someone close to you.”  
“Well, there’s your answer, you moron!” McCoy couldn’t contain himself anymore. Not only was the answer pretty obvious, but it had been there all the time, known to Kirk but willfully ignored by him. “Can’t you see? He felt guilty about having been used to hurt you, and decided the only way to protect you from further hurt was by removing himself… But you wouldn’t approve, so he manipulated you, using your insecurities…”  
“I see that you’re trying to make me feel better, Bones”, Kirk answered, and to McCoy’s surprise, he didn’t seem any less gloomy than before, and not in the least convinced. “I know that I failed. I only made a fool of myself, showing an alien race how weak and despicable human beings could be… A person who can’t keep their own dignity can’t lead other people, be a captain…”  
“For God’s sake, Jim!” McCoy was becoming desperate. He grabbed Kirk’s arms and shook him violently, oblivious of the freshly regenerated joints. “You’re an excellent captain! Neither I, nor your crew, nor even Spock could dream of a better one!”  
“Let me go, Bones! You’re hurting me. I appreciate your concern, but your friendship for me is keeping you from seeing the truth. I’m a disappointment. A failure… I know Spock disdains me, he told me so and I sensed it in the meld…”  
“You said you just sensed something dark… Oh, forget it… Why am I wasting my time?...”, McCoy let go of Kirk, covering his eyes with his hand in a gesture of utter weariness. There was no discussion with Kirk: he knew what he knew, because his precious first officer had said so, and bringing the entire crew to sickbay and having them say how much they respected and admired their captain would probably not help either.  
“I’m sorry Bones, I really am…” These words reminded McCoy how Kirk had said them when he first opened his eyes after his rescue, speaking to his torturous hallucinations, convinced that he had caused all his crew’s deaths, and he felt his heart sink again. He couldn’t blame a man who had just been through so much for not thinking with full clarity. Especially if he had his most logical friend’s word to support his misconceptions.  
“Don’t apologize, Jim”, he said, squeezing Kirk’s hand in his and summoning his gentlest smile. “If you persist in resigning from Starfleet, just know I’ll drop my uniform myself and follow you to Iowa, to pester you for the rest of your days.”  
“You can’t, Bones! You’re the best surgeon in the Fleet!...”  
“And you, sir, are the best captain. And the most stubborn. I must leave you now, I have a report to write. Ensign Vennini threw himself on a Ve’llarran console and got his face burned…”  
“Is he all right?”, Kirk asked, instinctive anxiety for his crew making everything else momentarily irrelevant.  
“Yes, Jim, he’ll be all right”, McCoy reassured him warmly. So will you be, silly. Just wait till I’ve spoken to a certain blasted Vulcan. Now, I know better how to make him recede.

When Spock came back from sickbay after presenting his resignation to Kirk, all he was able to do was sink shakily to a chair and bury his face in his hands. He took several deep breaths and tried to summon his Vulcan control. He knew that he was doing the right thing, but… did it have to be so difficult? Even as he made the decision to leave, the pain of anticipating the solitude to come was enough to almost make him flinch. But all he had to do was go back to what he had seen in the meld, the despaired, humiliated, broken captain, staring in utter horror at his first officer’s martyrized body, to know that it was his duty to do everything possible to protect this man from ever feeling like this again. He could do nothing about the harm done already to his dearest friend, but he could prevent a similar thing from happening ever again. Being cruel to Kirk was the worst part of the plan, but Spock had expected that nothing less than a betrayal, a humiliation, would force Kirk to let him go, so he lied, striking the most sensitive chord in the human, questioning brutally his integrity, his command, his respectability. He had known that his words would hurt Kirk, but seeing this face, still physically marked by the horrendous ordeal, fall completely apart, uncovering naked anguish that seemed to literally hinder his breathing, hearing the feeble, aborted defense and being forced to crush it – was almost too much. Spock left sickbay in the very last moment before giving it all up, acknowledging the lie, falling on his knees and begging for forgiveness, possibly even crying… In his attempt at meditation, Spock tried to focus on achieving his goal. Kirk would feel hurt, betrayed and abandoned for a certain time, but then McCoy would convince him not to care about this vile treacherous Vulcan, and he would forget him and continue his career, that would eventually become the most illustrious in all Starfleet history. With his only weakness removed, he would be able to conquer any obstacle, no entity would be able to threaten him anymore… And Spock… he knew he could also forget. That was the only consolation, the only way he could force himself to carry out this bitter duty. He would go to Gol, submit to the Kolinahr discipline, and purge himself of all emotion. The memory of Kirk’s agony, of his own inadvertent part in his torture, of the guilt for not having accompanied him to the Sunset Bar in the first place, the guilt of breaking his heart now… He anticipated the calm, the lack of pain that the Vulcan discipline would bring him, and he almost couldn’t wait to reach Earth and go to Vulcan. Still, the thought that he would completely stop attaching any value to his life on the Enterprise, to Kirk, caused him a pang of pain, cast a shadow on the promised peace of mind.  
Before he could put his emotions in any order, let alone control them, McCoy stormed into his office without even buzzing the door, yelled at him, insulted him, even spat at him, but Spock barely paid him attention. He was pained to hear that his words had caused Kirk’s heart to fail, but he had been helped and was fine now, and McCoy with his wild anger was playing exactly into Spock’s hands: Spock wanted him to blame “the green-blooded computer”, to curse him, and to convince Jim that everything was the Vulcan’s fault. It hurt, of course, but at least it would help Kirk get over it; get over him.  
The next day was a little easier: he had duties on the bridge, there was some commotion due to an ensign getting accidentally burned, then another one due to the repairs on the warp drive leading to inflicting even more damage, which wasn’t even a real problem, since Earth had very good repairing facilities and they weren’t all that far from there anyway. The fatigue of routine captain’s actions, more complex and tasking than the Vulcan had realized, at least kept his mind from Kirk, making his suffering only a dull background noise, unpleasant but fully manageable. Once in his quarters, Spock barely had time to refresh himself when he heard the familiar buzz. For a moment, he was terrified at the thought that the captain might have seen through his bluff and come to reason with him: he wasn’t sure he would be able to maintain the act. Fortunately, it turned out to be only McCoy. He looked sad instead of angry and was holding a bottle of some alcoholic beverage of the sort humans drank to make a party merrier, or a worry easier to bear.  
“I’ve come to apologize, Spock”, McCoy said, entering the room and searching for glasses.  
“There is no need, Doctor. If there is nothing else…”  
“On the contrary, Spock, I need to speak to you about a matter medically relevant, of course. Where do you keep glasses?”  
“I do not intend to indulge in…”  
“Of course not, you’re a Vulcan. I, however, am not, as you very well know. Will you offer me a glass or am I to drink from the bottle?” Slightly appalled, Spock produced a glass. The doctor poured full of liquor into it and drank it in one gulp, then refilled it. “Are you sure?...”  
“What is this about, Doctor?”  
“Why, about Jim, of course”, McCoy answered innocently.  
“You advised me yesterday about his cardiac arrest, but he had been helped adequately…”  
“Yes, yes, of course. However, he seems to be developing symptoms of a serious psychiatric condition, known as clinical depression, at such rate that in a few days, he might end up lying down, doing nothing and staring into the ceiling.”  
“This is a most disturbing prospect”, Spock admitted, but if he was indeed disturbed, he didn’t show it. “I fail to see, however, how this is related to me.”  
“Do you? I don’t think so, Spock. Be serious. I know you’re smart. You can play a dumbass, but I know you’re cheating. But all right, let me play your game and explain it to you. What you said to Jim just… broke him. Not only broke his heart, which is normal when a man you have always cherished suddenly announces he disdains you. His entire personality cracked. It had been seriously damaged by the Ve’llarrans, you know. Seven days of tortures, mockeries, lies and disheartening illusions habitually aren’t so good for self-esteem. To be a naked toy in someone else’s hand, to be broken at will, torn apart is, in fact, the most humbling of experiences. But when you believe to come back to your life, to your friends, and they also find you contemptible, then you just… have no choice but to believe them.”  
Spock listened to the doctor with his usual calm, and McCoy was unable to determine whether his words were making any effect or not.  
“You know”, he continued, “those gashes and tears he’s got from the Ve’llarran claws, on his face and all over his body… the grotesque wings scratched deep in his back… they’re not healing. They won’t heal until we find out how to neutralize the poison. They hurt like hell. Of course, I can control it with a painkiller, but today morning Jim refused to take one… He told me he was feeling fine, but the pain indicator was over half way up the scale… He refused, because he preferred to endure this pain rather than think about what a failure and a disappointment he was.”  
“Doctor!” Spock’s face now showed his anxiety rather clearly, especially for the doctor who knew him quite well. “He surely does not consider himself a failure. He is an intelligent man, he must understand what an exceptional leader he is…”  
McCoy permitted himself a bitter laugh.  
“Really, Spock? Well, he’s also quite logical. He reasoned to himself that if his Vulcan friend, who cannot lie, who knows his mind and is benevolent to him, finds him disgusting, then there’s no other possibility than it being so. Of course, I tried to convince him otherwise, because for me he’s the best captain in the Fleet, but I didn’t manage to overthrow his logic. Will you help me, Spock? What do I tell him to convince him he’s not a failure? Do I tell him that his best friend lied on purpose to hurt him? But you know that he will never believe that. He will believe you over me, over the facts, over himself. This is how he trusts you. Now tell me, Spock, does this man really deserve to disdain himself, after everything he’d suffered from the Ve’llarrans, after everything he’d done for the Federation, and for you?”  
“No”, Spock gave the obvious answer.  
“Why did you do this to him? What did you see in his mind that was so hateful? Is it because he cried when he thought you were being eaten alive? Begged for mercy? Became insane? Do you find his affection for you despicable, Spock?”  
“No”, came the answer again, whispered.  
“No, Spock, really, explain it to me. I want to help him, but I don’t know how… Anyway, I’ll have all the time in the world. I’ve decided to follow him to his Iowa farmhouse. It’s a little in the middle of nowhere, but hell, I’m his friend. I won’t leave him alone, depressed… Starfleet has already had some of my best years and skill anyway.”  
“What do you mean… Iowa? Doctor?” Spock barely manage to choke those words out. The very un-Vulcan expression of shock was now obvious on his face.  
“Haven’t I just told you? He disdains himself. He finds himself despicable, taking your kind friendly word for that. He has filed his resignation with Starfleet Command, unconditional, effective immediately. Why are you looking so surprised? You thought he’d stay in charge of people, when his most loyal, most brilliant first officer finds him unworthy of his services?”  
“Doctor… you must… he cannot… this is all wrong…” Spock staggered, and McCoy grabbed his elbow to stabilize him. The Vulcan freed his arm, but the expression of confusion, terror, and pain on his face was horrible to watch. McCoy couldn’t quite yet bring himself to feel compassion, but he decided to relent nonetheless. The last thing he needed was putting the acting captain – a Vulcan, with his twisted Vulcan physiology – into cardiac arrest.  
“You don’t disdain him, Spock”, McCoy said softly. “Why are you doing this to him? To yourself? Vulcan or not, I can see that you suffer…”  
“It is necessary, Doctor”, Spock answered when he got some hold of himself. “Do you not realize I am a weakness for him? Not only did I fail to save him from being grievously harmed, I was also used against him, to cause him pain worse than the shocking chair, to the point of making him desire death…”  
“Oh, Spock, come on. We all have attachments. Think about yourself: what would you do if you saw Jim torn to pieces with savage claws, then eaten alive in front of you?”  
“I would not… cry, scream or injure myself…”  
“All right, so not that. But you would suffer. In fact, we know what you would do, don’t we? Because in fact, you DID see him torn, tortured, crazed with pain. You felt his agony. And where has it lead you? Look at yourself, you’re simply unable to bear the hurt from almost losing him, the guilt from being used against him…”  
“Doctor! If you think I’m merely trying to protect myself from pain…”  
“That’s exactly what I think! You may rationalize, convincing yourself it’s Jim you’re protecting, but the facts are what they are: you only broke him like a dry twig, even more effectively than the Ve’llarrans had! Can you escape the pain of being close with someone, and seeing them suffer? Do you think it’s better to escape? Fine! But for the love of, don’t trample Jim in the process! Spock, you can’t leave it like this! You owe him the truth!”  
“Doctor, I… I can’t stay… I must go to Vulcan, purge my emotions…” Spock was now shaking violently, his words barely passing through constricted throat, his face a mess of agony, unsolvable conflict written across his normally so impassive features.  
“All right, Spock. I’m not saying you must stay with him. But be honest with him. Let him have his dignity back. Go tell him you lied, you humiliated him on purpose to be able to run away from him, and I assure you he won’t ever want to see your face again. That should take care of your problem…”  
“Yes, Doctor…”, Spock answered painfully. Learning just how much his words had hurt Jim was agony. The image of Kirk disdaining himself, quitting Starfleet, convinced he was unworthy of being captain just because of his words was like Spock’s worst nightmare come true. Guilt was so overwhelming he couldn’t imagine how he would be able to live with himself, unless the Vulcan masters really managed to rid him of all his emotions. And the worst of it all was the realization that maybe, after all, he horribly hurt Kirk in a moment of his greatest vulnerability not in order to eventually protect him from similar harm in the future, but simply because he was unable to deal with his own feelings. The doctor was right: the worst pain, the one he was really escaping from, was not Kirk’s, but his own, of seeing his friend hurt beyond measure, of being used to torture him, of having been unable to save him before agony drove him insane. He was, as the doctor had put it, only a miserable excuse for a friend. But at least now, the doctor offered a viable solution. The thought of Kirk hating him for how he deliberately hurt him was, of course, unpleasant, but much less so than responsibility for ruining his life.  
A light touch to his shoulder tore Spock from his thoughts. McCoy was shyly leaning over him.  
“Spock, for goodness’ sake. Stop doing this to yourself”, he mumbled under his breath. His voice bore no trace of anger anymore, but was suffused with sorrow and, possibly, guilt. “You don’t deserve this. You never deserved what I told you the last time, but I was so angry I lost my capacity at thinking rationally.”  
“On the contrary, Doctor, you were right”, Spock cut in, straightening himself and shaking off McCoy’s hand. “I deliberately harmed a man who had always been a loyal friend to me, trusting me beyond his own judgement. I mistakenly assumed I was acting in his best interest, but now I see that my real motivation, that I had failed to identify correctly, had been to protect my own feelings. This fact renders my actions inexcusable. I will now go to him and acknowledge my lie. Until we get to Earth, I will confine myself to my quarters beyond my duty hours, and once there, I will arrange immediately for a transportation to Vulcan…”  
“Spock! Spock!” The look in McCoy’s blue eyes was now gentle, compassionate. “I’m sure things can still be fixed between the two of you. Contrarily to what you seem to think, protecting your feelings is a natural reaction to such a traumatizing experience as your meld with Jim must have been, damn it, as seeing him on that viewscreen must have been! I have blamed you blindly, I admit, because watching what your words did to Kirk was almost beyond my strength, after I had watched him writhe in pain under this cursed drug, hallucinate, ask for death… But I failed to recognize how deeply you were hurt, Spock. You just accustomed us all to your Vulcan efficiency, and it was so wrong of me to let you deal with your feelings alone… I’m your friend too, Spock, not just Jim’s. I want you both well, and that’s not gonna happen if you part in anger and guilt… Jim will be mad with you at first, but I’m sure he will eventually forgive you…”  
“No, Doctor”, Spock denied firmly. “I do not wish to be forgiven. I deserve nothing less than his hatred and disdain, and I do not expect he will ever speak another word to me. Neither do I deserve your friendship.”  
“Spock! Having feelings, and acting upon them, is certainly not an unforgivable crime…”  
“You said it yourself: I broke the person who had trusted me, mere days after he had been tortured nearly to death. Now please leave, Doctor. I need to meditate a few moments before I go to see him. I presume I will find him in sickbay…”  
“No, I discharged him to his quarters…” He’s still too sick, but I couldn’t bear seeing him avoid people’s glances and smiles, clearly mortified while he should be radiating pride… “Please, Spock, I would like to help you, but I really don’t know how…”  
“I do not need help, Doctor, I need punishment for what I did. But please take care of Captain Kirk. While I believe that telling him the truth might help rebuild his self-esteem that I so thoughtlessly destroyed, I do not doubt that my revelation will not fail to upset him. Temporarily, I hope. I do not judge myself worthy of prolonged worry on the captain’s part…”  
“You’re so wrong… But all right, I will leave you for now. Take care of yourself, Spock”, McCoy finished, feeling just as helpless as he had after their previous conversation. Only now, while he had some hope Kirk would recover from his depression learning that Spock, in fact, had never stopped respecting him, he was worried about Spock. Also, he was beginning to feel really on edge from worry. The week during which they pursued the Shi’nw’aer across the galaxy, painfully aware of what Ambassador Na’mhanwr told them of the captain’s probable fate; the days straight after the rescue, with Kirk incoherent, deluded, suicidal; the shock of his sudden resignation, of Spock’s cruelty to him precisely when care and support were most expected; the shock of seeing the normally impassive half-Vulcan trembling, overtly pained, nearly crying – it all had drained McCoy’s resources. Not to mention, he was overworked, overtired, and frustrated over not being able to get rid of the Ve’llarran natural poison and finally heal Kirk’s horrific wounds. Wounds, he reminded himself with horror, part of which he got when his captors ripped bits of his flesh apart and just ate them in front of him, pretty much like they did on the bridge for all Kirk’s senior officers to see. Trying to shake off the traumatizing recollection, McCoy dragged himself wearily to his own quarters, determined to get some sleep regardless of the relatively early hour of the evening. He could be of no use to his friends and patients when he was like this. He had just advised Spock to take care of his feelings, to stop underestimating the trauma induced by seeing a close friend harmed in such horrific manner, but… didn’t the same apply to himself? Wasn’t he the one who had patched Kirk’s completely ruined shoulders, who dressed his wounds daily, who held his hand when Spock dealt him the one blow too many?... Hell, he was traumatized too, and neither of his two best friends was in a condition to see it and take care of him. He promised himself that the next day, he would invite Scott over for a drink and try to bare his soul for him, but he was too exhausted to do it immediately, although he felt like his emotional state could benefit greatly from such a meeting. However, as soon as he entered his quarters, before he even had time to take off his boots, the familiar buzz of his communicator made him start with anxiety.  
“McCoy here”, he answered, fully alert at once.  
“Doctor! This is Ensign Wang, from the lab!”, came an enthusiastic reply.  
“Yes, Ensign?”, McCoy asked, struggling not to give in too soon to a treacherous glimmer of hope.  
“I believe we have made substantial progress with counteracting the effects of the poison from the Ve’llarrans’ claws! However, we are still struggling with accounting for its composition when it has reacted with the molecules of human flesh… We thought that if you could come… Or maybe the acting captain…”  
“No!”, McCoy cut her off quickly. “He’s a science officer, not a medical officer!”, he protested, although Ensign Wang herself and most of her team were science officers as well. “I’m coming!” For goodness’ sake, let’s at least get this one thing over with!, he thought, forgetting his fatigue and setting off for the lab.

Kirk was glad that he had been released to his quarters, although still strictly off duty – duty that he had anyway no intention of ever performing again, much to his despair. The wounds and gashes were still burning, still painfully unhealed, but after all he had been through, Kirk found the pain almost negligible. His nerves, on the other hand, were much improved, and he could eat his soup without missing his mouth with the spoon half of the time, his limbs weren’t twitching uncontrollably all the time anymore, and his vitals had stabilized at a level close to normal – or at least, closer than before. He felt much better in his own quarters, where he wasn’t constantly exposed to concerned looks of the medical staff, to McCoy’s unrelenting fussing, and to more or less disguised visits from his crew, who were anxious to see for themselves if he was really faring better, but didn’t always dare admit that they were there for him, so they invented various pretexts. Kirk tried to put up a smiling façade, but he didn’t need a verbal feedback to know he was failing: anyone who came to talk to him departed more unsettled than reassured, and it showed on their faces even though they were also trying to disguise it, for his sake. He looked like a miserable shadow of his normal self: thin, pale, dark circles around his eyes, those awful gashes across his cheek, and an emptiness in his eyes that he was unable to mask behind a contrived smile of his mouth. He felt like a deep abyss was gaping inside him, swallowing one by one different aspects of his life, his joy, biting at the very core of his personality. With the prospect of relinquishing his command, leaving his ship, his friends, feeling unworthy of them, lonely, despicable, broken, he could hardly muster any motivation to even try and keep up some appearances of normalcy: he would probably have given that up hours ago if it wasn’t for Bones, whose genuine care for him suffused him with vague gratitude, but more distinctly, with guilt.  
The worst of all was that sometimes, a flicker of hope burned briefly somewhere deep in his heart. Had he really been so wrong to act as he did? Was there any way he could have been more impassive, while tortured, seeing his friend devoured alive in front of him? Couldn’t Spock be mistaken? Or… Kirk remembered one time that he, himself, had savagely insulted his first officer, and almost got smashed with a table for it, not meaning one single cruel word he had uttered. Was it possible that Spock had some reason to act as he did, other than Kirk’s worthlessness, less palpable than the spores, but equally compelling? McCoy had suggested… But no, it couldn’t be true, it would be just too absurd to humiliate one’s friend in order to protect them… from ordinary affection. It had to be all for real, then, and he had better get used to thinking about himself as the failure that he was.  
Although the hour was already pretty advanced, the door buzzed and Kirk was sure it was McCoy who wanted to check on him one last time before going to sleep, so he said “come in” and released the lock. When he saw Spock at the door, he tensed instinctively as if in anticipation of some further hurt. However, desperate to spare himself additional humiliation, he somehow managed to school his features to relative calm. He did a passably good job of it, although not half as good as Spock: the Vulcan looked completely impassive, but there was some strange numbness in his usually alert and vivid gaze. Getting up from the bed, looking at the floor, too ashamed to meet Spock’s eyes, Kirk took the initiative of mumbling in what he hoped to be a professional and detached tone:  
“I assure you that I sent your resignation to Starfleet Command, Mister Spock. They haven’t replied yet, but as soon as they do…”  
“Captain”, a silent, even voice interrupted him with admirable efficiency. “I do not disdain you. I never have.”  
“Ah”, Kirk gasped, still unable to look up. He felt his cheeks burn painfully as a wave of blood rushed to color them brightly, giving away how ashamed and humiliated he was feeling. So, this isn’t about business, he thought, terrified at the idea of having a conversation that could just return the iron in his wounds, or make new ones. “I bet that’s something Doctor McCoy forced you to come and tell me…I guess he’s a little worried about me, but don’t mind him: I’ll be fine…”  
If Kirk had known how much pain these words, along with his downcast gaze and blush, caused Spock, he would have never uttered them, nor would he have looked away or blushed. But he was merely trying to protect what little was left of his dignity, and since he wasn’t looking at Spock, he couldn’t notice the utter devastation that his face now reflected.  
“Captain… Jim… look at me…”, the Vulcan whispered, and the deeply personal, even emotional nature of this request made Kirk’s gaze finally meet Spock’s, causing utter confusion. “I… wish to apologize for what I told you yesterday. Please know that I never meant it. I have never felt anything but deep respect and admiration for you, more than for any other being I have ever met…”  
“But… but… what you said was all true… I did, in fact, cry and beg… and I snapped, leaving my mind unprotected…”, Kirk protested feebly, completely disoriented, unable to tell the lie from the truth anymore, yet still fearing to hope.  
“The fact that you begged for my life or cried to see me dead is an honor, Jim”, Spock answered gently. “An honor that I do not deserve. Losing your mind was not your choice, and did not jeopardize any information. Your resistance to the horrors that you endured does you credit, and is keenly admired by all those who have read the reports about what happened on the Shiner… Even your enemies admired you, although they probably hid it well.”  
“Not as well as you”, Kirk remarked bitterly. Relief fought with an acute sense of betrayal. If this was, after all, the truth, then Spock had deliberately humiliated him in a most cruel manner, and that could only mean that Spock wasn’t as much of a friend to him as he had thought… which hurt only slightly less than finding himself unworthy. Or maybe, it hurt more. “Why? If you don’t think I’m despicable, then why did you tell me so? What had I done to deserve…?” Kirk choked on his words. He was beginning to feel anger rise in his chest: emotion he had somehow avoided feeling since his return from the Ve’llarran ship, at first feeling too relieved to be alive and back to his life, and then, too depressed.  
“As I had initially tried to tell you, it unsettled me how hurt you were upon seeing me die. I figured that only removing myself from you could protect you from similar harm in future, or from being ever used as leverage against you…”  
“And it seemed… perfectly logical to you to hurt me yourself instead, so that no aliens can do it in future?” Kirk’s eyes still reflected vividly his hurt, but his voice was trembling with hardly mastered fury.  
“It was an error in judgement”, Spock explained, his eyes sad. “I assumed that my words would cause you discomfort, but…”  
“Discomfort?!” Kirk was now yelling. “Do you even know what you’re talking about?! You broke my heart! You made me feel unworthy, despicable, not good enough to serve on one ship with a person whom I had believed to be my friend… Was I ever mistaken! Get out of here and never show your face to me again! Not ever, do you understand?!”  
“Captain, if I may explain…” Spock had been prepared for anger, but actually enduring it was more painful than he had anticipated. Still, convinced as he was that he deserved it, he had no intention to defend himself, he merely wanted to make Kirk feel better by explaining that he had, in fact, acted out of friendship, as questionable as his view of it might have been. But Kirk was overcome by anger and hurt, clearly beyond hearing logical explanations.  
“You may not! There’s nothing you might want to say that I would like to hear! Get out! Get out!”, he yelled, shooting his arm forward to point at the door so brusquely that he ended up wincing and cradling it against himself in pain. Not wanting to cause him further aggravation, Spock left the room hastily, without one look backwards at his angry friend. Once in his quarters, he immediately put out his meditation set. He needed to regain some control, some inner balance, just enough to survive the few weeks that separated him from his intended journey to Gol, where the pain would finally be over. The hurt, angry face of his betrayed friend would be haunting him till then, no doubt, but he hoped that at last, the memory would fade, lose its edge, maybe disappear altogether. Spock now believed that having humiliated Kirk had been wrong, and that he had ascribed more altruistic motivation to this action than he had really felt; but still, he wasn’t sure if leaving itself had been a wrong decision. He was appalled by the way Kirk’s disappearing, and then finding him in a lamentable condition completely crumbled his emotional control, stripped him of his logic, even made him abandon the Vulcan code of ethics, thus undermining his very identity. He remembered passing some of his unconscious feelings to Anthony Dawdy when he probed his mind for information – never before had he inadvertently hurt a being he had melded with during his missions. Worse still, after recovering Kirk seriously injured and crazed with pain, he deliberately breached the Vellarrans’ minds, not only to extract vital information more efficiently, but also because he actually wanted them to feel his anger, because he was so furious that he couldn’t contain it any longer. All in all, both himself and Kirk were emotionally compromised, cared about each other too much, and a command team working under conditions of continuous danger shouldn’t have too strong feelings so ready to be held against them. In a way, they both failed the test and broke down seeing, or believing to see, the other dead or in agony.  
Meditation proved much easier than on the previous day. Telling the truth and having been believed relieved Spock’s worry about Kirk’s mental condition: he hoped that now, the captain would no more accuse himself of having failed, but would concentrate all his negative feelings on his anger against Spock. Moreover, having endured a partial expression of this anger took some of the edge off Spock’s guilt: he still felt very bad with what he had done, but the punishment eased this feeling at least fractionally. When he succeeded in calming his mind to a state relatively similar to his previous Vulcan control, he managed to get several hours of sleep, for the first time since the night when Kirk went to his supposed meeting at the Sunset Bar. Dreamless Vulcan sleep refreshed him, and he woke up feeling slightly better. The first thing he did in the morning, when he got to the bridge, was, as usual, reviewing reports from what had happened during the night, and one of them was from sickbay. They had finally found the substance counteracting the Ve’llarran poison, and the report, signed by Christine Chapel, said that all of Captain Kirk’s long gashes had been regenerated, and his other wounds started healing as well. Spock felt relief and gratitude. When his shift, relatively uneventful, was nearing its end, the turbolift’s door swooshed and he suddenly froze in his chair. He didn’t have to turn around to know who entered. All the crew present jumped out of their chairs, started cheering and applauding, some of them rushed to greet the man who just entered the bridge with a hug, a pat on his shoulder, a handshake.  
“Captain! It’s so good to have you back!”, Uhura exclaimed, her voice barely audible, as if she was speaking into a pillow, and inadvertently looking at the polished surface of the closest console, Spock saw a reflection of her hugged in the Captain’s arms, with her face buried in his chest.  
“It’s good to be back”, Kirk whispered warmly. His voice sounded clear, rested, trembling and hoarseness having disappeared from it since last evening. Almost like it sounded before – before the capture, before the rescue, before Spock’s vile betrayal, before his shameful confession… Trying to somehow get hold of himself, Spock realized that the crew who had stayed near their consoles were staring at him in surprise. He should have been the first to rise and greet the captain… the crew knew nothing of their quarrel. Uncertain as to how he should behave, Spock started getting up from the chair, still without turning back to look at the captain. A firm yet gentle hand landed on his shoulder, and Kirk said right behind him:  
“I won’t be taking the chair, Mister Spock. Still off duty for now…”  
The tone of his voice sounded kind, maybe even friendly, but Spock immediately recalled Kirk’s fury when he had declared never to want to see him again in his life the previous evening. He felt that he should respect this wish: there was at least this much he could do for his friend whom he had so horribly wronged. Ignoring the hand on his shoulder and the words, he said numbly, still without sparing Kirk one look:  
“Mister Sulu, you have the conn”, after which he headed directly for the turbolift, without looking anyone in the face. The bridge suddenly went deadly silent. However, before Spock managed to leave, a hand grabbed his elbow.  
“No need to leave, Mister Spock, I wasn’t going to stay long”, Kirk said in an urgent, almost pleading voice. Spock turned to face him, aware of everyone staring at them with hardly disguised amazement. He thought that if he insisted on leaving, he would only give everyone more pretext for weirdest suspicions, therefore he nodded and answered:  
“As you wish, Captain”, after which he sat back in the command chair. Kirk stood at his side, as Spock had always used to do, and whispered directly to his ear, too silently for others to hear:  
“Spock, I apologize for yesterday. I’d like to talk to you. Will you drop by at my quarter after your shift ends?”  
Spock stiffened. An apology from Kirk was the last thing that he needed. He feared that after all, Kirk would try to reconcile them, to make him stay on the Enterprise, and this prospect was both appealing and terrifying. But regardless of his feelings and desires, Spock felt that he could not refuse Kirk a closer explanation, so he nodded fractionally to acknowledge the invitation, earning a silent “thank you”. Kirk then walked around the bridge, stopping by each console to chat with every officer for a little while, and left, promising to drop by again the following day. Passing next to Spock, he gently squeezed his shoulder, as if to remind him about their meeting, and maybe reassure him in case he feared a further display of anger, but he probably could never guess that a display of friendship, understanding, maybe forgiveness was what Spock feared much more: it would likely make his guilt return, maybe more acute than before, and it would require renewed efforts if Spock persisted in leaving the Enterprise, which he intended to do. Also, Spock feared that his actions, especially if he resisted being forgiven, or if Kirk really tried to keep him onboard, could again prove hurtful to Kirk, and with everything that had happened before, Spock was pretty determined to put the captain’s wellbeing ahead of all other considerations. 

As the shift finally finished, Spock got up, left the chair to his replacement, and directed himself straight to Kirk’s quarters: there was no point in delaying the meeting that he eventually had to carry out anyway. He buzzed the door, and the lock was released immediately, which told the Vulcan that the captain had been waiting for him. He entered, and stood at attention, his eyes only briefly resting on Kirk’s face before he directed them to the floor.  
“You have demanded to see me, Captain”, he said formally. He almost hoped that Kirk would attack him, make more accusations or reproaches, but after his friendly gestures on the bridge, and seeing his open, a little anxious face right now, he knew this was not what was about to happen.  
“Will you sit down, Spock?”  
“I would rather remain standing.” Close to the door. In a position allowing for a quick escape. Since when have I become a coward? “Unless you insist that I sit”, he amended.  
“I want you to be comfortable”, Kirk only said, and walked closer to Spock, half sitting on the desk. “Look, I wanted to apologize”, he said after a moment, when Spock didn’t make a sign of speaking himself. “I was confused and angry… It’s obviously not true I don’t want to see you anymore. Before I threw you out, you said you wanted to explain… I’d like to hear now what you had to say, if you still want to tell me.”  
“Captain”, Spock said through the lump in his throat. “Your apologies are illogical. After how I treated you, you are entitled to stop wishing any contact with me, and I would not protest if you made such decision.”  
“Is that what you actually want?” Kirk sounded hurt.  
“I am merely saying that I deserve your anger”, Spock hastily amended, mindful of his resolution not to upset Kirk again. Navigating between his conflicting feelings and priorities was becoming difficult, especially with his Vulcan mind unable of unwilling to calculate the different factors as if they were ordinary digits on a mathematical matrix. “I had tried to tell you that, while my behavior proved hurtful, I really did think that I was acting in your best interest. I endeavored to spare you pain, similar to what I saw you feel when you believed me dead. I had figured that our friendship was a liability to you and might in future hinder your command: the Ve’llarrans’ manipulations did manage to make you wish for death… Eventually, it has become apparent to me that wanting to protect you, I did, in fact, interfere with your wellbeing so radically that it hindered your command abilities, which was precisely what I had sought to avoid. Hence my presence in your quarters yesterday; pursuing your forgiveness, however, is not part of my current endeavors. Doing so would be illogical, since I do not deserve it.”  
“I see”, Kirk answered silently. He briefly averted Spock’s gaze, directing his to the floor, but after a moment he looked him straight in the eyes once more. “You talk all the time about how I felt, how this friendship is my weakness, how the Ve’llarrans used you to break me. What about you, Spock? How did my unfortunate capture make you feel? Do you consider me as your weakness? Will you be better off if you leave for Vulcan and forget you ever knew me? Just please: you owe me honesty. Don’t say that Vulcans don’t feel, because I’ll know it’s a lie.”  
Spock withstood Kirk’s firm gaze heroically, searching for an honest answer.  
“Once I understood that you were captured, I was feeling discomfort related to not knowing your whereabouts”, he finally admitted, looking down. “Discomfort that only grew deeper when we learned that you had been kidnapped by vindictive Ve’llarran separatists. When I saw what had been done to you, when I heard you scream, ask for death… I… I do not think that I grew up to Vulcan ideals of mastering emotion… I felt hurt, and angry…”  
“Seeing me hurt made you vulnerable. You don’t want it to happen again…” Kirk ventured.  
“It was… unbearable”, Spock admitted, uncomfortable under the scrutiny, feeling exposed and vulnerable again, but determined to be truthful and thorough. He considered it to be part of his so much desired punishment.  
“So, logically, Spock, it’s not you who are my weakness”, Kirk concluded, his voice and eyes very sad. “You rescued me, saved me, brought my mind back to life… have been my strength all along, even during the tortures, I thought about you for comfort… But I’m the one who is a weakness to you… You must avoid me, because I made your Vulcan control crumble…” The hazel eyes met the dark ones with overwhelming sadness. Kirk’s conclusion was too painfully logical for Spock not to see its rightness. Yes, that was exactly it: Kirk WAS his weakness. His capture and torture not only made Spock feel miserable beyond his capacity to control this pain, but also made him breach the Vulcan code of ethics: he inadvertently influenced Tony Dawdy with his feelings in the meld, he forcefully melded with A’pwyllh when Doctor McCoy had merely asked him to interrogate her. With Kirk around, Spock was a failed Vulcan, vulnerable and exposed. Going to Gol and purging this unwanted affection was the only way to make him what he should be… Should? Unwanted affection? There were elements in this reasoning that felt flagrantly false.  
Seeing Spock’s long hesitation at the answer, Kirk took it for confirmation of his conclusion, and the sadness of it overtook him completely. He lowered his head and covered his eyes with his hand. He was surprised when one strong Vulcan hand peeled his palm away from his face, and another one gently cupped his chin, pulling it upwards to meet his gaze.  
“No, Jim”, Spock protested firmly. “I might have felt like this, overwhelmed as I was by emotions stronger than I had ever known. But you are one of the very few people who have ever accepted me as I was, as well my Vulcan restraint as my human emotions. You saw me very vulnerable on several occasions and never used it against me in any fashion. You never even held it against me when I nearly strangled you in my Pon Farr. You made me feel accepted, took the loneliness away… You are the axe that permits to articulate my Vulcan and human halves and permits me to feel a whole individual, rather than a battlefield for two hostile natures. Saying that you are my weakness would be an offence to logic.” He finished softly, almost in whisper, and withstood without flinching Kirk’s searching gaze.  
“But if this is true”, the captain said hesitantly, “then why insist on leaving the Enterprise? Why refuse us a chance at reconciliation?...”  
“When I decided that leaving was the best course of action”, Spock answered in a slightly uncertain voice, “I deliberately humiliated you to make you let me go… I knew what you had just been through, that you were not even recovered, and yet instead of staying by your side as a friend, comforting you, helping you through this, I avoided you, said things to you that I knew would hurt you… Not only am I a faulty Vulcan, but a failed human being as well… I simply do not deserve your friendship, and would not bear staying near you and not having it, knowing I lost it by my own fault…”  
“No, Spock, that’s not true!”, Kirk exclaimed, visibly touched by his confession and his pain, tentatively putting his hand on one of the Vulcan’s. Spock’s hand twitched, but he didn’t take it away, so Kirk squeezed it slightly. Even through this casual touch, the Vulcan could sense waves of compassion and affection that Kirk was trying to communicate through the gesture. “First, you didn’t really do anything even half as horrible as you imagine. People say mean and hurtful things to each other all the time and don’t even give it a second thought. You did what you judged best, although I can only imagine what it cost you. Second, if you think you’re the only one to feel guilty, you’re mistaken. I have failed you lamentably, Spock… I was so busy wallowing in self-pity that I never even noticed you were hurt, too… Also, I should have known you better than to believe you would disdain me for just… crumbling under too much pain. I should have known to help you…”  
“But, Jim”, Spock cut him off, visibly surprised. “It is highly illogical to accuse yourself of failing me! You were hurt, you had almost died, you had been subjected to tremendous physical and emotional trauma… It is I who should have taken care of you! And believing my words hardly makes you a faulty friend…”  
“No, Spock, I should have… I should have…” Kirk was breathing in gasps, tiny beads of sweat breaking on his forehead. He had let go of Spock’s hand and lifted his palms to his temples, as if trying to soothe a headache. Spock half suspected that he would collapse or have a heart attack again, for he certainly couldn’t be fully recovered mere five days after his ordeal. But Kirk calmed down by himself, his breathing evened, he looked back at Spock and continued: “We could go on with these self-recriminations forever, but I’m not sure if it would do us any good. How about we forget about all this, and just move on? Start over with a clean slate? Do you still wish to leave Starfleet?”  
The question hung between them for a few moments, essential for the outcome not only of this conversation, but for their entire friendship, their entire lives. Spock still saw clearly all the logical reasons that had pushed him to leave, but he knew that his analysis had been incomplete, and therefore faulty.  
“I do not”, he replied firmly. “But the ‘clean slate’ you propose is unfair to you…”  
“Come on, Spock!” Kirk seemed overjoyed at Spock’s unambiguous confirmation of his wish to remain in Starfleet. “It’s you who are being constantly unfair toward yourself… But anyway, that’s the most logical solution! Will you stay aboard the Enterprise, as my first officer, to continue our five-year mission?”  
“Yes, Jim, if this is what you want, then I will be honored”, Spock answered. He felt enormous relief of making this statement, of seeing his future reinstated to the previous, desirable shape, and the vision of purging all emotions, including friendship and belonging, thankfully fading away. Relief, also, to see that his captain was beaming: he seemed absolutely happy for the first time since his rescue. They looked each other in the eyes, thinking about how close they had come to losing each other in the last days, and a shadow passed through Kirk’s face.  
“Jim?”, Spock inquired, concerned.  
“You know, on the Shiner… When they put me in this shocking chair… They kept me there, like, for ages. I almost thought I was going to lose it there and then, and it was only the beginning…” Kirk gasped, and it was Spock’s turn to reach for his hand and project comfort and reassurance. “I… to anchor myself, not to become crazy, I found it very comforting to think about you. I recalled how calm you always were, how you always managed to find a solution… It really helped me. But then, when they murdered this hologram that I thought was you, they told me they had learned about you from my mind, that I had led them to you, betrayed you…”  
“The Shiner left Earth’s orbit as soon as they smuggled you aboard”, Spock explained quietly. “They did find my image in your mind, but they only used it to harm you, not me. I was safe, Jim: from the very moment I realized that you were missing, I kept my guard up… But that they would make you believe, not only that they murdered me in front of you, but also that you helped them capture me, is a rare example of cruelty… I can only hope that they will be punished adequately at the term of their trial.”  
Kirk nodded, indicating that he was sharing this hope.  
“There was one thing that bugged me, you know”, he said, his voice calm, but still filled with pain. “That they brought you gagged. They seemed to relish my screams, so I figured they would also like to hear yours… or to make me hear them, for better persuasion. But I was already way too dazed to give it more thought. Now that I know it was just a hologram, it suddenly makes sense… It took but a hologram to reduce me to utter despair, sobs and begging…”  
“Jim…” It suddenly occurred to Spock that, although Kirk was visibly glad about putting an end to their conflict and ensuring that Spock would stay by his side, and although he had just moments before berated himself for not trusting Spock enough, he might still, even subconsciously, experience some doubts caused by Spock’s previous expression of contempt for him. This thought was very unsettling for the Vulcan. Fortunately, there was a way to make any such doubt disappear for good. “Jim. You wanted me to tell you about my feelings.” Kirk nodded expectantly, anxious that there was still something else that Spock hadn’t mentioned. “I would like to share all my feelings with you, and know yours, even the painful ones.” He lifted a hand to Kirk’s temple, silent inquiry in his eyes, waiting for permission to perform a meld.  
“But, Spock…” Kirk seemed a little unsettled by this offer. “You would then see that I was angry with you… or how bad it made me feel when I was fool enough to believe you disdained me… I don’t want to hurt you anymore!”  
“You will not”, Spock said firmly. “I already know about these feelings, Jim, and I accept them fully. I believe that such an open meld could prevent us from maintaining any further misconceptions, and facilitate the ‘clean slate’ beginning you proposed.”  
Kirk thought for a while, but finally nodded with a serious, almost solemn expression on his face. It was extremely touching that the Vulcan offered to give up his shields so completely, just in order to comfort him, to make their reconciliation more complete. He could not refuse such a gift, even though he was still afraid that seeing all his pain, all his hurt and anger again, even though they were mostly past, would hurt Spock again. The calm and gentleness visible in the Vulcan’s eyes conveyed reassurance. After a brief concentration, Spock touched the side of Kirk’s face with splayed fingers and said:  
“My thoughts to your thoughts, my mind to your mind… Our minds are one…”  
All the images of the horrible last two weeks, all the feelings, more or less conscious, flowed freely between them, this time unrepressed, uncensored, and unfeared. For the first time, showing it to Spock, Kirk dared also confront himself all the incredible suffering related to his detainment on the Shi’nw’aer: tremendous physical pain, prolonged indefinitely until he literally couldn’t bear it any longer, constant terror about what his captors were going to do next, naked despair at seeing Spock tortured and murdered, horrible guilt about having guided the Ve’llarrans to him, utter horror and disgust as bits of his own flesh as well were torn and devoured, humiliation of being a naked, broken toy in enemy hands, and the final heartbreak upon being made to think that he had betrayed his ship, leading to his crew’s deaths, to McCoy hating him… his wish to die. He also showed Spock the immense joy and relief upon discovering that his worst grief had been unfounded, the gratitude he felt when Spock brought him back from his mental death, the anxiety when Spock avoided him, the utter devastation and self-loathing caused by his disdainful words, the blind anger when he learned that he had been manipulated, and the guilt upon finally realizing what Spock must have suffered, and how alone he had been with it. Spock, on his side, also bared his soul in the meld: the pain upon seeing Kirk’s bruised and bleeding body dragged by the Ve’llarrans on the viewscreen, upon listening to his relentless screams of pain, seeing him insane, wishing for death, literally dying of despair… The guilt of having been unable to protect him, of having refused to go to Sunset Bar with him, of not having been able to catch up with the Shi’nw’aer earlier, to spare Kirk at least part of the agony. The blind fury against his captors, making him act with A’pwyllh against the Vulcan code of ethics. The unexpected fear, emptiness, loneliness of this heartbreaking discovery of how great a price was to be paid for genuine friendship and affection, leading to a broken refusal for any of them to pay this price anymore, no matter what… The excruciating guilt of hurting Kirk, enduring McCoy’s fury, the need to make it all right again, hindered by the fear that it would render all the suffering he had caused pointless, and by the certitude that he didn’t deserve forgiveness…  
But painful as all those sensations were, they now appeared bathed in mutual acceptance, affection, forgiveness, and the edge was taken from the bad memories in the meld by the realization that, as devastating as the pain had been, it was after all only an emotion, intense mere hours ago, but soothed, alleviated, nearly gone now. Tortures, fear, anger, guilt were nothing more than memories, and what was now foremost present in both the melded souls was happiness of being back together, saved, recovered, forgiven. Forever.

McCoy was distractedly reading reports about the night’s events: one crewman couldn’t sleep and had come over for a sleeping pill, and one other exaggerated with alcoholic beverages and had been dragged to sickbay by his two anxious drinking companions. Overall, it had been an uneventful night. For the first time in two weeks, McCoy was feeling rested and relaxed: for the second night in a row, he had got full eight hours of sleep, which was a rare luxury for a Chief Medical Officer on a starship. His most difficult patient finally wasn’t posing any medical problems: on the contrary, he was not only mostly healed from his injuries, good-humored and happy, but he even started tormenting McCoy to let him go back on duty… The doctor was well aware of the reason of Kirk’s magically restored wellbeing. Two days before, he had finally cleared all the lamentable misunderstandings with his Vulcan first officer, and the tremendous relief that he experienced proved salutary to his physical and mental health. During the past day, Kirk had been completely back to his self from before his capture: a cheerful, flirty, curious presence pestering the entire ship with surprise inspections. He had been cheered on the bridge and in the mess hall, but his appearance in engineering had apparently wreaked havoc, poor Scotty being unable to explain why the repairs of the warp core were so ineffective. Feeling guilty, although Kirk hadn’t overtly blamed him, Scotty had attempted to turn the conversation to another subject, and had half-jokingly proposed Kirk a visit to the Ve’llarran ship that they were dragging along on a tractor beam. Kirk had paled, lost his good humor, and hastily left the engineers to their jobs, promising himself never to wander there again, because obviously when disturbed, they were bound to have strange ideas. His good mood had returned shortly, but one crewman had reported to McCoy that the captain “had nearly fainted” upon mention of a visit to the Shi’nw’aer, and to avoid any unnecessary risk, McCoy had equipped Kirk’s wrist with a band monitoring his vitals, and feeding the readings directly to the terminal in his office. Staying alert was more than justified given that the trauma was still very recent, some of Kirk’s problems were still not fully cured, and if Kirk was going to have a cardiac arrest upon being reminded of his ordeal by some careless crewman, McCoy preferred to know about it immediately so as to be able to rush to his aid. Although he hoped it wouldn’t be necessary: for the moment, the readings were stable and McCoy’s main problem was convincing Kirk that he was not yet fit for active duty.  
McCoy had to admit to himself that he was quite glad about how this horrible misunderstanding between the captain and his first officer had ended. The evening when he and his lab team had finally discovered the substance capable of counteracting the natural poison contained in Ve’llarran claws, an exhausted McCoy had summoned to sickbay an extremely hurt, bitter Kirk who, fortunately, no longer considered himself unworthy of command, but claimed he would never again trust anyone and that real friendship didn’t exist. During a very long session with the regenerator that had finally become possible once McCoy had rinsed all of Kirk’s horrible wounds with the newly found chemical, they had had time to talk it over, every single aspect of it. By the end, Kirk was all contrite and guilty at how he had yelled at Spock and told him never to show his face to him again. McCoy had to admit he had strangely resented this sudden change of heart: deep down, he was still angry at Spock for how he had acted with the captain. But on the whole, it was a good thing they had finally managed to sort it out, even if McCoy thought Kirk was too forgiving with the Vulcan. Their reconciliation meant that everything – really everything – was going to go back to normal. They would deliver the Ve’llarran ship to Earth, wait for the trial and likely participate in it as witnesses or auxiliary accusers, and then they would just go on with the five-year mission, visit some new planets, meet some new, most likely hostile lifeforms, contract new diseases, prevent new catastrophes and maybe cause some – well, everyday on a space exploring mission that McCoy had learned to like, although for the life of him he wouldn’t admit it.  
He suddenly chuckled as he realized that, in order to make it all happen, Kirk had to take back his and Spock’s resignations from Starfleet. Those two idiots! Who were they trying to fool? Well, the green-blooded first officer could always escape to Vulcan, to perform some of their anti-emotional purging rituals, but Kirk? What exactly had he been planning to do with himself? Glancing at the chronometer, McCoy recalled that now precisely was the time for when Kirk had scheduled a subspace talk with Starfleet Command, determined to clarify this problem. McCoy had cleared him to have the talk, because he judged that postponing it was going to cause Kirk more anxiety, detrimental for his shuddered nerves and weakened heart, than actually having it, especially that after what McCoy had told Admiral Komack, he was fairly sure taking these resignations back was pure formality and shouldn’t cause Kirk any distress. He was fairly surprised when, glancing at the terminal to check on Kirk’s vitals, he noticed that not only his heartrate and blood pressure were way too high and rising, also his oxygen saturation was below normal and dropping. For a few moments, he just stared at the readings trying to understand what was happening, but, following their rapid further deterioration, an alarm set off, sending McCoy to his feet.  
“Computer! Locate Captain Kirk!”, he requested, anxious, grabbing his medikit.  
“Captain Kirk is in his ready room”, the computer obliged, and McCoy headed in that direction, running for his life. The door of the ready room wasn’t locked, so a simple voice command opened it, and McCoy felt his heart sink when he saw Kirk on the floor, unconscious, as pale as a sheet, bathed in sweat and gasping for breath. He delivered a hypo in his neck and pressed a portable oxygen dispenser against his mouth. Only when the readings started to stabilize, McCoy regained his composure sufficiently to even hear that he was being called by a very anxious, pleasant feminine voice. He turned around to see the owner of the voice – a stunning blonde in her early forties, with admiral distinctions – gazing at him from the terminal. He clenched his fists, angry, and turned to talk to her.  
“Listen, Miss Admiral”, he spat out, still very shaken by the emergency and unable to properly control his behavior, “what the hell do you think you’re doing, sending my patient into what I assume was a severe panic attack? You have just risen his blood pressure to a level that could very well cause him to have a stroke! His sats dropped to fucking 80 percent, which means he nearly choked!...”  
“Will he be all right?”, she asked anxiously, guilt visible in her symmetrical, attractive features.  
“No thanks to you!”, McCoy yelled. “What the fuck is wrong with you commanding officers? I’ve sent you a dozen reports, describing in every freaking detail what those monsters did to Captain Kirk, and you really don’t know better than to upset a tortured, traumatized man? Did you make him talk about his captivity? What the hell did you do?!”  
“Listen, Doctor McCoy”, the admiral answered, the guilt in her voice now almost entirely replaced by irritation. “I assure you that I’ve read all your reports, although it was by no means a pleasant reading. I didn’t hurt the captain on purpose and I regret having upset him. However, I was trying to debrief him on the details of his new assignment…”  
“Wait, what?” If McCoy had been angry at the beginning, now he was fuming. “New assignment? Are you crazy? I haven’t cleared him for duty! The man was brutally tortured during a full week, and was retrieved half dead merely another week ago…”  
“I’m perfectly aware of the current stardate, thank you, Doctor”, the admiral retorted without making an effort to hide the sarcasm. “However, his new task is urgent and I’m afraid it can’t wait. When he regains his senses, tell him to recontact me…”  
“You must be kidding me!” Now, McCoy wasn’t joking anymore. He slammed a fist in the table in front of the terminal. “He’s not recontacting you, nor is he taking any freaking assignment. He’s off duty for two weeks, at the very least. Can’t you see? If I hadn’t placed a life signs monitor on him, you could have very well killed him… As his doctor, it’s my responsibility…”  
“I know that, Doctor”, she cut in. “However, as soon as he’s fine enough to finish our conversation, I want him to call me back, or else, you tell him Starfleet Command will process Mister Spock’s resignation.”  
“You… what?” The enormity of the situation couldn’t fully reach McCoy, who was on the best way of having an attack of some sort himself. Was Starfleet Command trying to blackmail a traumatized, not fully recovered Kirk into some mission the sheer mention of which made his vitals explode? “Wait there, Admiral. What was it that you told him that made him faint?”  
“I’m sorry, Doctor, I’m not authorized to discuss the details with anyone but the captain. Please make sure he gets better soon, and maybe… give him some tranquilizer before he calls me back. Also, you could probably use some counselling yourself: you seem pretty emotional. Vavrenko out.” The screen went blank, and so did McCoy’s mind, so overcome with fury that there was no space left for thinking. What the hell was this all about? How the hell dared they?!...  
“You stupid witch!”, McCoy yelled helplessly at the screen, and lifted his arm with the fair intention of swinging a fist straight into the place from which the blond face had disappeared, but was stopped by a moan and a stir from the captain, who shortly opened his eyes, casting McCoy a surprised look.  
“What… what happened to me?”, he asked hesitantly, rubbing his temples. The doctor helped him up and he slumped heavily in a chair, glancing at the terminal and suddenly remembering. “That’s just great…”, he sighed. “Looks like I have just fainted on Admiral Vavrenko, like some helpless mademoiselle… I’ll never hear the end of it! I’ll be a joke in Starfleet Command till my last breath.”  
“Is this really what’s worrying you now?”, McCoy asked him irritably, letting part of the anger he was still feeling be perceptible in his voice. “Dammit, Jim, I had a word with this lady! She said she wanted you on a mission of some sort…” At the mention, Kirk visibly shuddered, and his heartrate accelerated almost audibly. “For goodness’ sake, Jim, you’re not fit for duty! You’re not doing any missions for at least two more weeks!...”  
“Yeah…”, Kirk muttered, covering his face with his hands briefly in an attempt to calm himself. “I’m afraid it can’t wait this long. I’d better call her back before she has the time to tell the tale of my graceless loss of consciousness to every single officer in Starfleet Command…”  
“Will you stop that nonsense? As cheeky as this lady seemed to be, she must understand what you went through is no joke! You’re not clear to have this conversation… You have nearly driven yourself into a stroke a moment ago… However…” McCoy hesitated a moment, uncertain whether he should repeat the admiral’s threat, but when pressured, he reluctantly admitted: “She said if you didn’t recontact her, the brass would accept Spock’s resignation.” Kirk seemed bitterly unsurprised.  
“There go my options for potentially refusing the mission”, he sighed, disillusioned.  
“Jim, you can’t let them blackmail you…”, McCoy started, but Kirk cut him off:  
“That’s all right, Bones, I was going to agree anyway. Seeing that they’re willing to bully me into doing this, no matter how clumsily, only confirms that they think it’s important. And since they’re Starfleet Command, with all those tough heads working with them, they probably have it all figured out really well. Vavrenko herself has a reputation for being quite a smarty. Did you know, Bones, she’s Starfleet’s general chief of operations? A tactical genius, they say of her. Not to mention, she’s really cute.”  
“I fail to see how this is relevant…”, McCoy commented critically.  
“Well, it isn’t anymore, since there’s no chance she’ll be interested in a man who faints in the middle of a conversation…”, Kirk answered with a distinct dose of disappointment, at least part of which was designed to cheer his interlocutor up, to no avail: McCoy got even more angry.  
“If you think your condition is something to joke about, Jim, you can laugh, but alone!” he snapped. “I had to treat you when they beamed you back from the Shiner, crazed with pain, bloodied and broken, and I’ll go straight to hell if I ever laugh about it!”  
“Sorry, Bones”, Kirk said sheepishly, patting McCoy’s arm. “I’m all right now, though, and you don’t need to worry so much anymore… And my task, anyway, isn’t anything taxing: I just need to speak to a few people, and say the right thing on the trial…”  
“The right thing being, I presume, the truth?”, McCoy asked severely.  
“A… version of it, we might say. Now, please clear my ready room and let me finish this conversation.”  
“Let me at least be here with you”, McCoy sighed, knowing that he would never convince Jim to refuse performing his task, whatever it might be.  
“Yeah, fainting like a girl, then reappearing in the company of my doctor to babysit me… Do you want to ultimately humiliate me in her eyes, and crush what thin chances I might still have with her?” Kirk’s eyes were twinkling mischievously. McCoy sighed, but he figured that the jokes, while clearly meant to reassure him, also meant that Kirk himself was now having a better hold of himself and the risk of another panic attack appeared to be negligible.  
“All right, all right”, McCoy lifted his hands in a defensive gesture. “I’m going, but… take it easy, okay?”  
“Promised.”  
“Like it means anything…”, McCoy muttered, heading for the exit. As soon as the door closed after him, Kirk proceeded to resuming the communication, subconsciously afraid that if he delayed it, he would only become more nervous about it. He had pretended self-assurance with McCoy, but deep inside, he felt significantly less ready to perform the tasks Starfleet set him than he was willing to admit. Especially when those tasks implied direct contact with his cruel captor. Whenever he thought of A’pwyllh, Kirk heard her taunt him ruthlessly when he thought Spock was dead, and the image was sufficient to send his vitals to the moon. Thinking about McCoy’s anger if he collapsed again, he forced himself to calm down as he said:  
“Computer! Open direct subspace channel to Admiral Anastasia Vavrenko…”  
“Channel o…” the computer didn’t even have time to finish the very short sentence, and the admiral had already answered it. Her face on the screen was visibly concerned, maybe even guilty, but as she saw Kirk on her own terminal, she audibly sighed with relief.  
“Are you okay, Captain?”, she asked politely.  
“Yes, Admiral, and I wish to apologize…”, Kirk replied, a little embarrassed about the humiliating show of weakness he had displayed, to make things worse, in front of such an attractive woman.  
“Oh, but there’s really no need for it, Captain. Actually, I’m quite flattered. It was the first time my presence made a distinguished Starfleet officer faint!” Concern for his wellbeing, relief, guilt, were all gone from her attitude, replaced by shameless playfulness. Kirk wasn’t one to miss his chance at playing it cool, especially after he had thought this chance had been taken away.  
“Why, Admiral, you don’t expect me to believe I was the first”, he answered, flashing his most winning smile at the screen. Vavrenko returned the smile, visibly pleased by the compliment.  
“You know, Captain?”, she said after a moment of silence, licking her lip. “When I read your report about what this Captain Appel did to you, there was a curious feeling that it stirred in me. But perhaps you don’t want to know…”, she cut herself off in an unmistakably teasing manner.  
“Try me”, Kirk challenged, a little uncertain as to where this conversation was headed. He certainly didn’t want pity from Admiral Vavrenko; but neither did she seem to feel any.  
“I was jealous”, the admiral answered.  
“Jealous?”, Kirk could barely hide his surprise.  
“She got to taste you…” The admiral was staring at the screen provocatively, smiling slightly, seeming completely unruffled by how her words could or could not be understood. She was a gambling type, Kirk realized, probably so used to having the upper hand that she didn’t really fear to risk any longer. After a week of dealing with people who didn’t dare to speak louder than in whispers around him, never mentioned his capture and tried so hard to be tactful that their tactfulness itself painfully reminded him of how horrible his capture had been, hearing Vavrenko’s careless flirting unexpectedly came as a relief.  
“Admiral”, he answered, leaning into the screen, his eyes narrowed, “if you only wish it, you can do the same, without going to all the trouble of tracing and abducting me…”  
“Oh! It’s a date, then”, she replied immediately, slightly blushing this time, but her open expression indicated it was more with pleasure than with embarrassment. Kirk wondered why she hadn’t flirted with him like this before: he was quite sure he would have never fainted if she had. Maybe she had simply reassessed her strategies: after all, she wasn’t Starfleet general chief of operations for nothing. However, something in her body language made Kirk hope that her interest was genuine – if, possibly, only temporary and rather shallow – and he promised himself to make the most of it.  
“A date”, he answered. “In San Francisco, after the trial? If we made it before, I doubt I would be able to concentrate on all the things I’m supposed to say…”  
“Am I correct to conclude you decided to say what we want you to?”, she asked, suddenly all business. Kirk didn’t blame her: he knew that it was her duty to get him to do what Starfleet wanted.  
“I’m still considering it”, he answered. “No offence, but I’m not sure if you really know what you’re doing. You claim to have read the reports, and yet instead of punishing Appel, you want to… promote her. Your general policy being not to negotiate with terrorists, you want to… cancel the accession talks, exactly what she had demanded. Please understand that I need some clarification on this.”  
“Of course”, Vavrenko answered hastily. “Listen, I know to you, Appel must seem like a monster… and I agree she acted like a terrorist. But after she did what she did, the Council decided to review some of her previous claims and check a little more insistently if they were really unfounded. What we discovered is really unsettling: while a part of Ve’llarran population is willing to join the Federation head first, many of them – almost a half – are scared out of their minds! Did you realize that suicide rate increased tenfold among the Ve’llarrans in the last three years? Tenfold, Captain! And the most frequent cause is ‘existential anxiety’…’”  
“How come the Federation never noticed it before?” Kirk asked, frowning.  
“How come, indeed? Starfleet has plenty of protective policies for societies who haven’t yet invented interstellar travels, but in case of technological development close to our own, we tend to assume that a given society is ready for contact. Ve’llarrans may have discovered warp drive, but paradoxically, never put it to good use other than visiting several neighboring planets, trading trifles with them and just confirming their outlook, as those societies are similarly pious to their own. You must also know, Captain, that those who kill themselves, those who are in fear, are not exactly the most forthcoming, the most audible part of the Ve’llarran society. We had contact mostly with those who wanted to contact us, like Ambassador Namar, and Appel was literally the only one who made it her task to speak for those who didn’t want new technologies, new friendships, new horizons. That’s why we desperately need her as a diplomat, to represent those of the Ve’llarrans who aren’t ready for progress, for us… You must convince her to take the job. It shouldn’t be too difficult, as it roughly matches what she was fighting for, but with the Ve’llarran concept of justice, and her faith in all things Ve’llarran, I admit it might require some strategic thinking.”  
“Let me get this straight”, Kirk answered. “You want me to go to my tormentor and beg her to accept going unpunished for what she did to me…”  
“Yes, I know how it sounds, and I wish I could ask someone else to do this, but there’s no one else who can: as her only victim, you’re the only one who has the moral right to forgive her…”  
“It looks like you have usurped this right”, Kirk remarked bitterly.  
“For goodness’ sake, Captain, you know how much is at stake!”, Vavrenko exclaimed fervently. “We’re all very sorry you got hurt, and I’m personally sorry to be asking this of you so soon, but you understand yourself that managing your feelings is less important than ensuring the wellbeing of an entire planet…”  
“Why, my feelings are completely unimportant…”, Kirk protested, feigning outrage. “But what do I tell Ambassador Namar? You realize that this treaty is her very life at this moment… When she saw how badly I was hurt, she attempted…”  
“Yes, Captain, I read the reports”, she interrupted him. “And I count on you to convince her that cancelling the talks is necessary for the time being. The Federation will never turn its back on Ve’llarr: we will remain friends, allies, and those who want it will be given opportunities of travelling to any Federation planet unimpeded… but we must reduce our presence on Ve’llarr, to make sure that those who aren’t ready, aren’t exposed to it…we’d still love her as ambassador! She can even take part in the Council’s sessions, as a counselling voice, without the right to vote.”  
“So you want me to convince Namar that the Federation and Ve’llarr are still friends, and simultaneously to convince Appel that the Federation will stop mingling with Ve’llarr…”  
“I’m sure you can convince any woman of anything, Captain…”, Vavrenko cut him off, flirty once again.  
“…And also, to convince the people on Earth, who unfortunately learned that I was abducted by some Ve’llarrans and massively demonstrate their outrage, that in fact, nothing happened at all”, he finished, ignoring her too instrumental compliment.  
“Oh yes, the last part is very important”, she agreed. “We want the trial broadcast, to sell the public our version. So, you don’t mention any torture, and especially not that they tasted some little bits and pieces of you… You say you understand Appel’s fight, forgive her for having used you, and ask the judges to cancel her sentence. Of course, you must convince Appel and Namar, along with your crew and your irascible doctor, to go along with this version. And… Captain. You realize that if you faint on the cameras at the mere sight of Appel, we won’t fool anybody…” All Vavrenko’s words might have been viewed as cynical when directed to a person who had just gone through deliberately inflicted hell, but the last sentence was nothing less than cruel. Kirk fully felt its sting, but strangely enough, more than hurt, for once he felt relieved by the admiral’s cavalier treatment of his vulnerabilities. Mere minutes before, he had developed a massive panic attack at her sheer mention of the necessity for him to face A’pwyllh; now, she didn’t fear not only to continue asking the same task of him, but even to tease him about it. She trusted him to still be a fully committed, fully functional Starfleet officer, who wouldn’t melt or shatter when faced with his trauma, and that was what he, as well, craved to trust himself to be. He knew, of course, that he was being simply treated like a tool instrumental in achieving a desirable outcome, but he didn’t mind: he had always known that in Starfleet, no one counted more than the tasks they were able to perform, and if the brass started to go all tactful around him, worried not to hurt his feelings, it could only mean that he wasn’t deemed useful anymore, and that his career, his life of discoveries and wonders, his star trek, was over.  
“Don’t worry, Admiral, I won’t faint”, he answered, smiling reassuringly. “I’ll file reports as soon as I’ve talked to Namar and Appel and, hopefully, convinced them to your new policy.”  
“Thank you, Captain”, Vavrenko answered. As officer of superior rank, it was her task to end the conversation, but for some reason she lingered, staring into the screen, assurance and playfulness fading slowly away from her face, leaving it somewhat sad as she finally asked: “Do we still have a date, Captain?” She didn’t have to add: after I’ve just brushed your suffering aside like it was nothing.  
“We most absolutely do”, he answered, his face lit up with a warm, sincere smile, his hazel eyes twinkling with anticipation, and with a promise. 

Spock didn’t say much during most of the debriefing during which Kirk bluntly exposed to his senior staff what was expected of them. He was quite eloquent in explaining the reasons: Starfleet had committed a mistake with Ve’llarr and had to do all their possible to set things right; A’pwyllh was the best suited for representing those on Ve’llarr who feared joining the Federation or didn’t want it; he was the best suited to convince her to cooperate; they weren’t actually required to lie during the trial, just not be too graphic about the truth; it would be most unfortunate if humans were to entertain some prejudice against a newly met race only because one person suffered some displeasure; justice was not about revenge anyway; orders were orders and, whatever they thought about A’pwyllh escaping unpunished, there was nothing they could do anyway; he was completely fine, he agreed with Starfleet Command and was ready to do it, so he expected the same of them. For Spock, if it weren’t for the falseness of Kirk’s repeated protestations of how well he was faring, and if Vulcans could feel pleasure, it would be a pleasure to see the captain deliver his speech, all concentrated on his message, throwing his hands in all directions in exaggerated, enthusiastic gestures that were so characteristic of him, covering the most difficult parts with his trademark charming smile, locking eyes with every crewmember who, even though just with their gaze, communicated disagreement… And they had all disagreed at first, some of them expressing outrage and protest in a rather vehement manner. Spock himself experienced considerable discomfort at the idea of A’pwyllh getting away with her crime, but the arguments that Kirk brought up were not illogical, and if he was feeling ready to confront his tormentor personally, then who were they to protest? McCoy, however, seemed to know better and wouldn’t hear about Kirk going anywhere near A’pwyllh, yelling about PTSD, unstable vitals, heart attacks and strokes in a manner that was so disordered due to his uncontrolled anger that it was actually difficult to make any sense of his reasoning. Using all the considerable rhetorical arsenal at his disposal, Kirk had managed to win over every single person in the room, but McCoy remained an unforgiving exception, and did nothing to hide his disapproval. Spock thought that his open, hostile resistance, supported with repeated mentions of the captain’s unfinished recovery, had to be difficult for Kirk, who was obviously doing his best to show that he was fine and had left the Ve’llarran incident far behind him.  
“I’m not made of glass and won’t break just because I’ll be talking to Appel… It’s not like she’ll be able to hurt me again, Doctor, so I suggest you relax…”, Kirk was trying to sooth McCoy, showing signs of increasing irritation himself.  
“Oh, really, Captain?”, McCoy interrupted mockingly. “Yesterday it was enough for Admiral Vavrenko to merely mention you talking to Appel and you downright fainted on her, your readings indicating a massive panic attack!”  
Kirk’s face flushed a deep shade of red. He glared at the doctor and, instinctively, glanced around at the assembled officers, who avoided his look probably making it even worse. Spock felt his own lips press together into a thin line as his gaze dropped as well.  
“Well, precisely, Doctor”, Kirk countered with an annoyed sigh. “She surprised me, and I admit I had a moment of weakness, but just one hypo and ten minutes later I was able to finish the debriefing, and as you see, I’m perfectly fine…”  
“The hell you are!” McCoy got up from the table, the violence of his move overturning the chair behind him.  
“Doctor! Mind your…”  
“You’re just one huge weakness at this moment, no matter how hard you’re trying to hide it!”, McCoy yelled, visibly oblivious that he was speaking to his captain, on an official debriefing. “It’s been only a week, and you can’t be anything but vulnerable at the moment, because you’re not the superhuman you probably imagine you are! If the jerks from Starfleet Command can’t understand something as simple as this, then they’re fools unworthy of anyone following their orders! But you actually want to do this, don’t you, Jim?”  
“I just think it’s important to…”  
“You realize they’re just arrogantly using you as a tool to cover for their mistakes, implement their policies, and you’re happy to be used just because you think it makes you look tough! Well, good luck, Jim, but if you prefer to treat yourself like Starfleet’s puppet rather than a person, then don’t count on me to put you back together if you get broken again! And don’t expect me to lie on the trial about your condition when these monsters were done with you!” With this, McCoy rushed out of the briefing room, and if the door wasn’t automatic, he would no doubt have slammed it hard behind him. Silence that ensued was uncomfortable even for Spock, but if Kirk’s flushed cheeks and downcast look were any indicator, it was even more so for him. He briefly stroked his forehead with his hand, then took a deep breath and said:  
“I guess the meeting is over. You know what Starfleet Command wishes and you know your orders. Dismissed.”  
Everyone looked like they had to prevent themselves by force from speeding for the door, apart from Spock, who made no sign of moving, and Uhura, who approached Kirk as the others were leaving.  
“I’ve grown quite close with Ambassador Namar these past two weeks, Captain”, she told him. “If you wish, I could assist you in informing her about the Council’s decision…”  
“That would be much appreciated, Lieutenant, thank you”, Kirk answered, smiling to her gratefully. When she left, he looked at Spock.  
“What does my first officer and acting captain think?”, he asked. “You didn’t speak much during the meeting.”  
“The doctor took most of the space”, Spock retorted. “But I agree with you. We are Starfleet officers and are bound to obey our superiors. Especially when their orders seem logical.”  
“Exactly”, Kirk answered, visibly relieved to see that Spock agreed with him.  
“However, Doctor McCoy may have a point”, Spock continued cautiously. “He seems concerned about your wellbeing…”  
“Unnecessarily so”, Kirk responded a little too hastily. “I’m really fine, and right now his constant fussing is making me a disservice… I want to be back to normal, I have wasted enough time already…”  
“Jim…”, Spock interrupted him gently. “Even without touching you, I can sense that you are afraid of speaking to Appel, and yet you are pushing yourself to doing it. I believe Doctor McCoy does not like the fact that you put other things ahead of your own recovery…”  
“First of all”, Kirk interrupted him angrily, “I’m not afraid of her. Second, my wellbeing is objectively an unimportant thing compared to interplanetary relations… McCoy is my doctor and he thinks that the entire world has nothing better to do than babysit me because I got a booboo. Well, the world doesn’t care about my booboos, and it can’t be blamed. If Bones doesn’t want to testify on the trial, he just won’t be summoned, and that’s all…” He shrugged a little nervously. Spock was looking straight into his face, frowning, and Kirk averted his look, annoyed. “What?”, he asked provocatively. “Why are you looking at me like this?”  
“I was merely startled by your choice of vocabulary”, Spock answered, his calm a clear contrast with Kirk’s restlessness. “Words like ‘booboo’ and ‘babysit’ indicate that you are intentionally diminishing the weigh of the crime the Ve’llarran separatists have perpetrated against you. I believe that Starfleet’s orders, by necessity oblivious of your condition or feelings, have encouraged such an approach from you, but I disapprove of it: it is neither honest nor beneficial to your wellbeing in the long term.”  
“Et tu, Brute?”, Kirk asked bitterly, visibly disappointed. “So you too would prefer me restricted to sickbay or to my quarters, doing nothing but remembering the events that honestly, I’d rather forget? It happened a full week ago, it’s already in the past, how long am I supposed to keep brooding over it? Or would you like me to broadcast every single detail of my torture far and wide, so as to make sure the Ve’llarrans won’t escape their punishment, Ve’llarr’s future be damned?”  
“No, Jim.” The Vulcan was still calm, but there was a hint of sadness in his voice. “As I have already told you, I fully approve of your chosen course of action, and I would certainly not wish for you to engage in stressful ‘brooding’. I simply cannot believe that you have already forgiven and forgotten what has been done to you, and your insistence in repeating that the task of convincing your tormentor to accept forgiveness does not bother you… sounds dishonest.” Spock paused a moment, then, a little quieter, sadness now fully audible in his voice, he added: “I have not forgiven her, nor will I ever do so, and I know that her actions have made me do things that I regret, and scarred me for life.” Kirk looked him in the eyes, startled and moved by the confession, all traces of annoyance disappearing from his expressive face immediately. He reached for Spock’s hand, opened his mouth to speak, but the Vulcan clasped his hands on his back and added before Kirk had a chance to utter a word: “I believe that Doctor McCoy has not yet recovered, either, from the emotional shock of seeing and treating you as you were a… ‘full week ago’. A mere week ago. Therefore, as you were the one to endure all the horror, he is unconvinced that you could be fully recovered by now.”  
Having said his mind, Spock slowly turned to the exit, leaving Kirk in turmoil.  
“I’m sorry, Spock”, he only said, because he had no idea of what else he could say. “I only want to feel normal again…”  
“You have nothing to apologize for, Jim”, Spock answered softly before the door opened to engulf his slender, elegant frame. 

When McCoy left the debriefing, he was so angry and shaken that instead of walking directly back to sickbay, he made a detour by his quarters to gulp down a glass of his secret reserve Saurian brandy. His head was exploding with messy thoughts and emotions that he didn’t even seek to sort out, just watched them thunder through his brain without bothering to assess or counter them. Those cheeky Starfleet bastards… What the hell do they want with a person who has just suffered so tremendous abuse? Don’t they realize that he should get at least a month of medical leave to shake this off before they start troubling him with their absurd demands? Why, they’re not stupid, so they must realize… they just don’t give a fucking damn! Asking of a man who, mere several days before, was tortured insane, drugged, manipulated into believing his friend and crew were dead, himself a traitor… for God’s sake! Asking of him to advocate on the trial that his tormentors go unpunished! Smiling, on the general broadcast, denying that anything ever happened! Asking that he go, face his captor and convince her, maybe beg her if she resists, to accept this rotten deal! Force him to listen as a freaking terrorist will likely moralize to him about how much of a fake and a liar he is, because she allegedly believes in justice! And of course, instead of telling them to go fuck themselves, and hard, Jim just runs where he’s sent like a well-trained doggy! Why can’t he see the absurdity of this entire situation? So, a week ago, the UFP was signing a rushed accession treaty with a new planet, and everybody was so happy, the planet seemed to love the UFP, nobody spoke about any problem, and then, wham! A bunch of fucked up freaks kidnap our captain, just because he’s alone on shore leave and some stupid incompetent Starfleet plebes don’t know to resist a telepathic attack, they torture the shit out of him, because of course he won’t tell them a fucking thing, like it would hurt anyone if he told them the fucking shield frequency – like he didn’t know we’d change it… Oh crap, I don’t even know if that was what they asked him to tell them… Anyway, as soon as I manage to patch him up to a state in which he can eat most of his soup without missing his mouth with his spoon, they suddenly conclude that after all, they were wrong, the whole accession thing was a mistake, and the fucked up terrorists were right from the start! Congratulations, Starfleet, if you had understood this two weeks earlier, Jim would have been safe… And then, as a reward, Starfleet wants the sadistic monsters who dragged Jim through hell for seven fucking days to become diplomats … Why, you’d think the brass find it a good thing Jim got kidnapped, at least this made them notice their error on time! And they can use him to mend it, although he’s in a condition of fainting in the middle of a conversation on a mere mention of that Ve’llarran witch… And still, somehow, he’ll be happy to do it, because he thinks it means he’s so tough, so reliable, so irreplaceable… like he hadn’t proved it sufficiently by denying those fucking sadists Starfleet secrets while they were torturing him into insanity… God, when I saw him dragged to the Shiner’s bridge, when I heard this continuous crazed shriek of his… When I saw his blank look, like an empty shell who can feel or understand nothing but pain, and then this feathery monster just tore off a chunk of his flesh and ate it, his cursed beak dripping with Jim’s blood as he loudly complimented the taste… When they beamed Jim back to the Enterprise… Suddenly overcome by a sadness that he was unable to repress, McCoy remembered the battered, bruised, bloodied body, the hoarse screams of unimaginable agony caused by the drug, Kirk’s ghastly conversations with his absent captors, or with McCoy himself, but a version of him who would hate and blame Kirk, who would help to crush him, who would maliciously inject him with the horrifying drug… McCoy felt a deep sorrow at having been used to torment Jim, and from beneath the grief, anger surfaced again. Monsters! Filthy insane sadistic maniacs! Who treats an innocent person like this? Why did it have to be Jim? He hadn’t even had anything to do with this cursed planet, why couldn’t you freaks have kidnapped and tortured whoever had first had the sorry idea of setting their foot on your pitiful world? How dared you press your filthy poisonous claws into the body of a person who never had wished you ill, one of the kindest, most honest of Starfleet captains?... And I couldn’t cure those wounds! For days they were there, all inflamed, red and painful, and all excellent doctor that I’m supposed to be, I couldn’t do a damn thing about it… Not that they were that much of a problem, after all… Why, they became a cherished acquisition that helped to turn Jim’s mind from Spock… Spock… McCoy felt a new wave of anger, almost as violent as against the Ve’llarrans. When he brought Jim back from his mental death, into which my own idiocy helped him plunge, I felt so grateful and so lucky, on Jim’s account, to have a Vulcan wizard onboard, who was able to repair my mistake, and on the same occasion, to bring him fully back to reality, to restore his sanity… But gods punish me if he didn’t pay for this dearly! I understand Spock was shocked, but how could he tell Jim he disdained him? How could he mock his weakness, while he had to understand how humiliating the torture itself had been, when he knew that the weakness was mostly for him? I’ll never, ever forgive him for this! He may have had his reasons, and Jim may presently be as happy with him as any time, but I’ll never forget Jim saying that he didn’t deserve to command people, after he had just successfully resisted most grueling torture… God, Jim, you’re a hero, everybody can be reduced to sobs and tears, it’s not a matter of strength or weakness, it only means we’re human… Well, at least Spock had real reasons to be unbalanced, and when he finally understood what he had done, he was so overcome with guilt that I almost felt sorry for him… while those cheeky Starfleet bastards think they can use people like puppets, and even a broken puppet can have some job done! “You could use some counselling yourself, Doctor McCoy!” Smug arrogant bitch, being smartass with me mere minutes after she literally pushed my patient over the edge, without as much as an apology! How does she imagine he can go speak to the person who did all those horrors to him? Who will patch him up if he has a heart attack, snaps again, gets furious and murders her, or is plagued by nightmares just because Starfleet decided to change their policy and figured out that an abused, brutalized, not even cleared fit for duty captain will be the best scapegoat to clean their mess? How can he agree to this? He always does! He lets them use him and is happy to be of use…  
McCoy noticed that his thoughts were running in a vicious circle, and that his anger at the Ve’llarran terrorists, at Starfleet, at Spock, at Kirk, were only facets of the same huge, inexpressible anger at the world, for being cruel, unfair, and unjust, especially to his friends and to himself. And with a pang of guilt, he suddenly regretted having taken some of this anger out on Kirk. Well done, Doctor. So, you won’t forgive Spock for upsetting Jim, but are you really that much better? I have just defied and mocked his orders in front of everyone, yelled at him, and left… If he was really fully recovered, he would have thrown me out of the room after I mentioned his collapse during his talk with Vavrenko… and he didn’t even manage to interrupt me as I went on yelling! I hope to God at least I made him angry, because if I see him depressed again, or worse, if he comes here to apologize for having upset me, I really don’t know what I’ll do. His brooding was interrupted by the comm signal. It was Chapel.  
“Doctor McCoy, what are you doing? Are you well? The debriefing is long over, your shift isn’t, and yet you never reported back on duty…”  
“I didn’t”, McCoy confirmed the obvious, glancing at his Saurian brandy bottle. All right, so he had helped himself to two little glasses, but he wasn’t drunk. “I’m coming.”  
“There isn’t any emergency, Doctor. I was merely worried…”  
“Yeah… I’m afraid I’m not in my best shape today, Christine. But I’ll be right there.”  
“If there’s anything I can do…”  
“No, no, I’ll be fine. I’m coming” Now, have you wallowed enough in self-pity, Doctor McCoy? After all, it’s not you who were kidnapped, tortured insane, then stabbed in the back by your best friend, supposedly for your own good. It’s not you who’ve been asked to go to your captor and beg her on your knees to deign accept your forced forgiveness. Instead of berating Jim, you should support him, he will probably need it if the PTSD hits him directly during his brand new diplomatic mission. What if this feathery witch mocks him? Reminds him how he writhed at her feet or something of the sort? What if he has a cardiac arrest? What if he gets angry and breaks her neck, Starfleet policies be damned? God, they’d most likely go for his head, discharge him from the service, maybe send him to a penal colony, although in all fairness, he would be in his damn right to kill Appel’s ass several times over! What if all goes wrong and I’ll have to put him back together again, like I had to after his green-blooded friend had the fancy idea to convince him he was a worthless piece of shit with no dignity or integrity?... God, Leonard, calm down already. For goodness’ sake, you’re not the one to whom all the bad things happened, this time! You’re the one who should be strong, supportive… Then be strong, and stop acting like a spoiled brat just because your friend got captured and tortured and now has to make pacts with his tormentors… Only… do you have any strength left, Doctor?  
Fortunately for McCoy, who indeed was far from his best shape at that moment, the day proved remarkably calm in sickbay. He remained there even after his shift ended, shifting papers and reading reports of Ve’llarran healers from the Shi’nw’aer, who, it appeared, also had been significantly busy for the last days. Although the captured Ve’llarrans didn’t have a chance to get injured in any manner, being kept under continuous watch in an area restricted by a forcefield, many of them had fallen and kept falling ill during the last few days. Apparently, the Ve’llarrans, who were a highly emotional race, could fall dangerously ill just because of prolonged emotional stress. McCoy knew that they expected to be punished in the worst possible manner, probably tortured and put to death, and imagined that was the reason for their failing health, rather than guilt and shame over the crime they helped commit. He read the reports about their diseases and treatment out of professional curiosity, but refused the opportunity to work with the Ve’llarran healers to learn something more. He simply couldn’t bear the thought of working with people who, their vocation being to help others, had permitted to do all these atrocious things to his friend, without any attempt to diminish his suffering. He didn’t want anything to do with them. Of course, he had nothing against the Ve’llarrans in general – he even genuinely liked Ambassador Na’mhanwr, for instance – but the separatists were beyond his capacity to forgive, at least now.  
It wasn’t until quite late in the evening that McCoy contemplated leaving sickbay and going back to his quarters to sleep, maybe after several more sips of his Saurian brandy. As he was about to get up from behind his desk, and began to put some order in his papers, he heard footsteps and after a moment, Kirk entered his office with a bottle of some rare, bluish, and illegal liquor.  
“You’re not allowed to drink such stuff yet”, McCoy muttered, clumsily trying to hide how nervous he felt. Fortunately, Kirk looked neither angry nor depressed: his expression was casual, with a tiny note of smugness, which suited very well a casual drinking visit with one of his best friends. Or, what would be a casual drinking visit, if the circumstances weren’t what they were.  
“I thought maybe you’d like some”, Kirk replied. “And why am I not allowed?”  
“This is no good for your liver, among other things.”  
“I don’t remember my liver being injured…”, Kirk protested, and McCoy only sneered.  
“This freaking shocking chair heavily upset your body’s chemical balance and ailed many of your internal organs. Your heart and your nerves got the worst of it, but it was actually quite hard on your liver, kidneys, and lungs as well, among other things”, he explained, getting just one glass from his cabinet and waiting for Kirk to pour before he sampled it with an approving sigh.  
“You never told me that!” Kirk was indignant.  
“I wrote it in my reports. I thought there were enough things bothering you, and all your organs were bound to heal completely… I was only worried for your nerves and your motor skills, but seeing how you handle the drink, that seems settled, too.”  
“You see, Bones? No need to worry about me anymore”, Kirk seized the opportunity to say what he obviously wanted to say from the beginning.  
“Sure, Jim, no more worrying”, McCoy replied with obviously fake complacency. “I wouldn’t be worried at all if you hadn’t fainted on Admiral Vavrenko, with your vitals all over the place, you know…”  
“You didn’t have to mention the fact to all my senior officers, Bones”, Kirk answered immediately, his voice a little harsh. “Nor do I appreciate that you yelled at me publicly… I’ll forgive it just this once, because I know it’s been difficult for you…”  
“Yeah, whatever”, McCoy answered dismissively, waving his hand. “You do as you please, whatever Starfleet finds fit, I don’t give a damn anymore. Just… don’t come to me if you have a heart attack.”  
“What do you mean by this?” Kirk asked, leaning more in McCoy’s direction over the desk, unsure if he should feel hurt or concerned. “Who else would I come to, Bones?”, he added softly. Shocked by the open question, McCoy looked him closely in the eyes and answered after a moment:  
“I’d like to be useful to you whenever you need me, Jim, but I just can’t handle this anymore… I just can’t take seeing you hurt again. When I had to treat you after what those feathery bastards had done to you, it was difficult and I ended up all shaken, but that’s what doctors do and I was confident I could get you through this. When the green-blooded hobgoblin freaked out and just decided he’d break you because the Ve’llarrans hadn’t done enough, I admit it was already becoming too much for me to handle. I told you a million times you were the best captain in the Fleet, but you just wouldn’t listen, repeating all the awful and degrading things you had allegedly done… Somehow, we managed to navigate ourselves out of this. When yesterday your life signs monitor alarm went off, and I found you unconscious on the floor, it stressed the hell out of me. And when you said on the debriefing that your task was to cover all this up and convince these sadistic terrorists to accept cozy new jobs as diplomats… I’m afraid I snapped. I want no part in it, and I just don’t care how it ends. If Appel gives you nightmares, you just go to M’Benga for sleeping pills. If you lose it and break her neck, you find yourself an attorney who will convince Starfleet that you were insane and not responsible for your actions. If she just gloats and reminds you how she had you begging for mercy at her feet, like sadists like her often do, you just swallow it all and hide it in this place in your head you apparently have for this kind of stuff, I don’t wanna know about it.”  
“I get it”, Kirk replied flatly. “You’re tired of caring for me. I don’t blame you, Bones. In the last few days you did more for me than I could expect anyone to do for me in a lifetime, and I’m grateful. It would be selfish, and unreasonable, to expect more… I can just assure you that not one of these times did I get hurt intentionally, but I think you know it. Anyway, this time, I was hoping to avoid any of the horrifying possibilities you mention, and face Appel prepared much better than I was for what Vavrenko had to tell me. But that would require for you to still care a little… so I guess I’ll just do it alone.”  
As he was pronouncing the last sentence, a hint of disappointment in his voice, he stood up from the chair and headed for the door, waving for the doctor to keep the still mostly full bottle and throwing him a muffled “goodnight”. As soon as he was on the corridor, he heard McCoy’s hasty footsteps right behind him, and suppressed a smile.  
“Jim! I’d like to know what you had in mind…”, McCoy simply said, grabbing Kirk’s elbow to stop him.  
“But what for?”, Kirk teased him mildly. “If you don’t care anymore whether I get hurt or not, why would you bother?...”  
“Well, I guess I was just indulging in wishful thinking”, McCoy mumbled apologetically. “You know damn well that I would never forgive myself if there was something that I could do to avoid you harm, and I’d ignore it…”  
“I just thought, Doctor, that you could come to talk to Appel with me, without forgetting your inseparable set of hypos. In this manner, if you see I begin to freak out, you can stab me with a tranquilizer or drag me out before I pass out or do something untoward”, Kirk explained with a smile.  
“What?”, this sounded too simple to be true, and McCoy was shocked never to have proposed it himself. “I thought you consider being babysat by your doctor as harmful to your prestige…”  
“When talking to a cute Starfleet admiral, yes”, Kirk retorted, “but with Appel, I don’t think I have any prestige left anyway, after she saw me sob, writhe in agony on the floor and shit myself.”  
“Well, she didn’t see you confess, did she”, McCoy cut in. “I like your idea”, he added, brightening up. “I presume you’ll also ask Spock to come?”  
“I already have. He agreed, but he didn’t seem thrilled…”  
“Yeah, it figures… We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t tal-shaya her instead of offering peace…”  
“He won’t, Bones, he’s a Vulcan, remember? Control! Ambassador Namar also promised to come with us and help convince Appel, in the unlikely case in which our combined charm would prove insufficient.”  
“Oh, and who has convinced her? You?”  
“Not alone, Bones. In fact, Lieutenant Uhura did most of the job. She delivered such a passionate speech that I was totally awed myself… She put all the accents in just the right places. Ve’llarr is a wonderful planet with wonderful people and wonderful culture – just like every other planet is – and the Federation wants nothing less than Ve’llarr joining it, but there are still many Ve’llarrans who just aren’t ready… Who are afraid, or too easily overcome by new stuff to take care of their own heritage and avoid total merging… And the Federation, who is a true friend to Ve’llarr, not just a greedy profiteer disguised as a friend, wants ALL the Ve’llarrans to be happy and at peace, also those who are less audible and less progressive. She stressed how we will still remain friends and allies… Actually, postponing the accession was the easier part: I think Namar had already understood that this was a little fast for many of her compatriots. What really revolted her was that we wanted Appel to escape unpunished and even to have a diplomatic function, but I convinced her that I didn’t mind, and in fact she didn’t harm anyone else – although she had planned to – and that after all, she was really the only one to speak up for those whom the Federation and Ve’llarran authorities had overlooked. She thinks Appel will agree to everything, but this justice thing might prove difficult to sort out at first.”  
“Yeah, to be honest, I resent the idea of her escaping unpunished as well”, McCoy muttered, “and it annoys the hell out of me that you say you don’t mind…”  
“Punishment is not the most important thing, Bones. Besides… she has suffered a lot. Did you know that her father killed himself, because he was unable to cope with the knowledge that the Spirit was nowhere to be found in the galaxy? She saw her world change rapidly, part of her culture evaporate…”  
“All right, all right, I don’t need you to lecture me… that doesn’t justify her, but… I understand that you can’t simply ignore Starfleet’s orders, so we’ll do what we’re required to do. Together.”  
“Thank you, Bones.”

Kirk wasn’t really afraid of speaking to A’pwyllh – not consciously. He was more anxious at the thought that she might refuse, causing Starfleet displeasure that he will be held responsible for, but that was a rather minor concern, easy to brush aside. However, when he went to sleep the night before going to face her, he woke up covered in cold sweat an hour later. The nightmare had been more vivid, more tormenting than the ones he had been having at regular intervals since his rescue. He tried to go back to sleep, but woke screaming and trembling again, his body all shaken by realistic memories of Ve’llarrans’ claws breaking his skin and muscles, of the liquid fire in his veins, of cruel taunts and threats whispered into his ear. Since he wouldn’t risk the same thing happening yet again, he decided to busy himself with reading till the morning, and compensated his lack of sleep with imbibing irrational quantities of coffee in lieu of breakfast. McCoy and Spock, who were eating with him, both cast him disapproving looks, but said nothing and Kirk didn’t volunteer to admit that the sheer intensity of the nightmares he had experienced that night told tales of how his subconsciousness was feeling about the task ahead of them. As soon as they finished eating, they got up and silently moved toward the brig, taking a detour to get Ambassador Na’mhanwr, and he suddenly felt like his feet were made of lead. Lifting them, putting one in front of the other seemed like a tremendous effort, but he managed to conceal it perfectly, although Spock threw him a discreet sideways look to make sure if he was all right.  
Theoretically, rationally, Kirk knew, of course, that he was perfectly safe. A’pwyllh could no more hurt him now than she could free herself or seize his ship – had she been able to do it, she would have days ago. He had told himself a thousand times that she had been defeated, and he was merely going to offer her mercy, but he would be facing her as an equal, or more precisely, as a victor, not as a helpless naked victim jerking and twisting on her whims. Not that he wanted to gloat, but there was some satisfaction in him at the thought of meeting her again, this time having the upper hand. He had managed to convince himself that all would go well and that this would be a talk like any other of his diplomatic performances, only easier, because instead of negotiating with an equal, he would be approaching a defeated party, whose only alternative was facing a severe sentence. However, when they finally got to the brig and he spotted the golden-brown splendor of her feathers, her unmistakable frame and face, all the rational knowledge evaporated, and he was instantly prisoner of the intent gaze of her perfectly round eyes, the Enterprise having dissolved around him, replaced by the nondescript room on the Shi’nw’aer that had been witness to his torture. All the sensations hit him at once, terror, anger, disgust, pain, despair, and their sheer force wreaked havoc with his vitals, almost causing him to collapse. But then he suddenly felt something that on the Shi’nw’aer, he had not had: Spock took his hand, projecting calm and affection through the touch, and McCoy immediately administered a hypo, after his eternal scanner emitted several choked beeps. These two gestures acted as anchors, dragging Kirk back to reality, and within seconds he was back in the present, almost as calm as he had promised himself to be. Thanking his friends with a smile, Kirk disabled the forcefield and the four visitors entered A’pwyllh’s cell. She maintained her gaze locked with Kirk’s, and she radiated apprehension and sadness.  
“Why have you all come here? Is it time for me to face my fate? Have we arrived to Earth yet?”  
“Not yet, but soon”, Kirk answered, and was pleased to notice that the words that slid out of his mouth sounded calm and casual, like he was talking to an acquaintance. “However, the Federation Council and Starfleet made some decisions concerning you and your world that we must discuss before the proper trial takes place. Can we discuss them now?”  
“I don’t think I can refuse”, she answered. The fact that they asked upset and frightened her, she thought it was a mockery of some kind – how indeed could she refuse talking to them? But her telepathic sense told her Kirk was being sincere, and it left her confused.  
“After your attack against Starfleet, the people responsible for the negotiations with Ve’llarr decided to look more closely into the foundations of your claims for postponing or cancelling Ve’llarr’s joining the Federation’, Kirk began matter-of-factly. “It seems like in their enthusiasm for gaining new friends, matched by that of many Ve’llarrans to open up to newly met people from space, they might have overlooked some serious problems that at least a part of Ve’llarran population faces due to the increased contact. They concluded that maybe they had been a little too impatient. They have, for now, cancelled the accession talks, and have decided to significantly withdraw Federation presence from Ve’llarr.” Kirk stopped, as a wave of A’pwyllh’s emotions suddenly hit him. He noticed that Spock flinched under the onslaught, and moved half a step backwards.  
“I… don’t believe you”, she said under her breath. “You’re trying to trick me, but why?”  
“It is true”, Na’mhanwr supplied in a serious, but calm and serene voice. “As ambassador, I have been consulted about the decision, and I have approved it. I’m sure you can sense Captain Kirk’s sincerity as well as I do.”  
“Yes…”, A’pwyllh confirmed, confused, not knowing what to say, until suddenly the full sense of the words hit her and she flooded the brig with an explosion of overwhelming joy. “So, you will leave us alone, free to enjoy our backwards ways as long as they serve us?”  
“Maybe not completely alone”, Kirk corrected, unable to resist his urge to smile in response to this happy excitement that A’pwyllh was projecting. “We have already met and this cannot be undone; besides, many Ve’llarrans are happy with the contact. But we will withdraw our technologies, broadcasts and cultural facilities from Ve’llarr, leaving only a diplomatic body for maintaining contact, a research party and an opportunity for those who want it to travel and trade with us. We will, of course, remain your allies in case you’re bothered by another force or need help of any kind.”  
“But… but that… thank you, Spirit! Na’mrinnwh ka’llynth…” A’pwyllh lifted her arms, then lowered them to cover her face, then lifted them again, and started chanting something in Ve’llarran. As she sang, her voice from the high-pitched, shrieking sound it had when she was speaking Federation Standard, turned into soft, melodious tone that was pleasant to hear. She seemed almost drunk with happiness, and the three Starfleet officers were staring at her confused as she sang and danced, seemingly oblivious to their presence.  
“Eh… Ambassador?” Kirk finally inquired, turning to Na’mhanwr, who remained silent and solemn.  
“This is a chant of thanks to the Spirit”, she explained quietly, trying not to disturb the singer. “It is only ten minutes long, so I suggest you wait before resuming your conversation.” Kirk nodded and listened with a sort of fascination, because the song, although in a way monotonous, was nonetheless very beautiful. The Vulcan also listened intently, showing respect for the performance and the faith behind it, and a feeling of something very precious, maybe even sacred, touched them fleetingly. Only the doctor seemed completely unaffected by the solemn mood, and continued staring at A’pwyllh with a sour, almost openly hostile expression; but no one paid him any attention. When the chant was finished and A’pwyllh seemed to take some hold on herself again, she addressed Starfleet officers.  
“Your Council… has made an inspired decision. Maybe I was wrong after all to consider your Federation as nothing more than ruthless conquerors merely disguised as friends…”  
“You were”, Kirk agreed softly, the smile still lingering on his lips.  
“If you retreat, remain only distant allies, cancel the joining… maybe there’s still a chance to preserve our way of life!... But that means that… in fact, what I did was right”, she concluded, surprised by her own words. Her guests’ smiles were instantly washed away, and McCoy felt his jaw clench, his hands curl into fists. “Don’t you understand?”, she continued enthusiastically, addressing herself to the three of them. “It means that your suffering wasn’t for nothing! Because of what you endured, many people on my world can be spared agony and death… Don’t you think it was worth it?”  
Kirk wanted to answer her, but found himself speechless, not knowing what to say. He felt Spock’s hand brush his again, in reassurance and compassion. McCoy couldn’t choke out a sound past the lump in his throat, but his outrage at the conclusion was visible. Finally, it was Spock who spoke:  
“We do not approve of helping people on the expense of other people’s life or health, and your deeds cannot be justified in any manner. However, we agree that the organization that we represent made a mistake by ignoring your earlier, peaceful claims, and we are indeed gratified to know that you consider this mistake as rectified.”  
“I do! Thank you! Even if I’m executed right now, I’ll die at peace, and happy.”  
“Err… about that…” Kirk cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but you most certainly won’t be executed.”  
“Ah… Yes… I remember now, a young ensign explained to me that I was to be sent to a penal colony… I’ll serve my punishment there with peace and happiness”, A’pwyllh amended.  
“Ah… I’m afraid that won’t be possible, either”, Kirk protested, a sheepish smile back on his lips. He was impressed by how happy A’pwyllh was: she had really kidnapped and tortured him only because she hoped it would help her world, and not because it amused her. It was a relief to discover it, even though Kirk felt uneasy with the fact that her actions, as cruel and lawless as they were, had indeed proven necessary for achieving her goals. It was as though from random victim, he had suddenly become a still random, but required sacrifice, as if what had been done to him was justified by the outcome. Maybe it was, he thought. Maybe Starfleet really had to pay for a too cavalier approach to an alien world, only because it was technologically advanced… I had had nothing to do with the Ve’llarran first contact, but maybe I still deserved it, for what I did on other worlds… Always with the best of intentions, but are they enough?  
“It won’t? But then… what will happen to me?”, A’pwyllh asked, her joy suddenly replaced by anxiety. She seemed happy enough to be executed or sent to a penal colony, but the absolute confusion as to her fate was worse than even the darkest knowledge.  
“That’s why we are here. To offer you another solution”, Kirk continued. Feeling her utter bewilderment, he hastily explained: “The Council as well as Starfleet Command couldn’t help but notice the fact that, although very numerous Ve’llarrans were distressed by the joining or by the contact itself, they had spectacularly failed to make themselves audible. Many of them fell sick or even died out of sheer distress, some more resigned themselves, mourning in their hearts the loss of their ways, but they were unable to voice their concerns. Those who tried were shamed as backwards and resisting inevitable progress, denied time on general broadcasts, offered credits or goods for silence… You were one of very few people who stood up for them. You created and led the organization, Ve’llarr Independent, that gave those people a place where they could express their fears without being mocked or misunderstood. You learned perfect Federation Standard, studied Federation law and bravely spoke in front of the Council. Your friends organized sabotage, trying to delay the Tellarite councilwoman, without hurting anyone, merely to buy you some time. Only when you thought that there was no way of stopping the Federation peacefully, did you seek for a weak point and strike.”  
“It’s a little strange that you of all people should compliment me so, Captain Kirk”, A’pwyllh replied, confusion plain in her demeanor.  
“I’m merely relaying reasons for which Starfleet wouldn’t like to see you waste away in a penal colony”, Kirk answered, realizing as he spoke that, terrorist or not, A’pwyllh did, indeed, possess some redeeming qualities.  
“Then what would they have me do?”  
“They think you should join Ambassador Na’mhanwr and become a diplomat, a liaison between the Ve’llarrans and the Federation. Your voice would be very valuable, because you would be able to speak for those who identify more with Ve’llarr Independent. You know their feelings, and they have trusted you.” Kirk stopped, because the look in A’pwyllh’s eyes, as well as the emotions she telepathically projected, felt like a warning. Instead of happy or confused, she now seemed angry.  
“You can’t be serious!”, she said finally. “I’m a criminal… I did and still do believe I was fighting for a worthy cause, but I broke many laws of your world and mine, and simply committed a despicable action… Letting me get away without any punishment would be an offence to justice!”  
“A’pwyllh, you got what you wanted: the Federation will retreat from your world. But it will not disappear. The balance on Ve’llarr will remain delicate for a while, and as you very well know, try as we might, we will not always be able to determine what’s the best for all of the Ve’llarrans. By being there and doing as you’re asked, you could retain some influence over the situation and see for yourself that no more mistakes are committed. If you refuse, justice might be satisfied, but later don’t come complain that something went against your wishes”, Kirk told her, making his voice a little harsher. He saw that his argument was sinking in, and A’pwyllh’s anger was soon dissipated into confusion.  
“I think your offer is a very… generous one, in a way”, she finally said, still unconvinced, “but it would be absolutely inappropriate for me to take it… It would be so unfair…”  
“Was abducting and torturing an innocent man fair?”, Spock asked quietly. “You broke one of the most sacred rules of your world when you harmed Captain Kirk. Now, you hesitate to break a rule that seems of lesser importance to me, although doing so could bring further profit to your world. It is illogical.” A’pwyllh gazed at him intently, weighing his argument.  
“Justice has many faces in many worlds”, Na’mhanwr put in softly. “On Ve’llarr, we are adamant on dealing retribution for all wrongdoings. In the Federation, they do that too, but they also believe in second chances. You can’t be sure which conception is closer to the truth.”  
“You, a Ve’llarran, would you accept?”, A’pwyllh asked bluntly, and Na’mhanwr answered without a second’s hesitation:  
“Yes.”  
“Then I guess… I guess… would you really not punish me? Maybe you could at least put me through several sessions on the shocking chair…”, she proposed, desperate for a solution that would permit her to accept the proposal, that deep down she longed to accept, at the same time sparing her sense of justice.  
“This is out of the question”, Kirk protested firmly. “We haven’t practiced such… barbaric punishments in centuries. Besides”, he added quieter, “I ordered it destroyed. Along with all the reserves of this hellish drug that you were keeping on your ship.” He felt Spock’s hand slightly brushing his again, maybe by sheer chance, maybe not. McCoy, on his other side, tensed and clenched his fists, as obviously every mention of the torture devices that had been used on his patient was still enough to put him on edge. Kirk briefly rested his hand on the doctor’s shoulder, in an attempt to calm him down.  
“Whatever you want”, A’pwyllh said finally. “And… thank you.”  
“Right.” Kirk tried not to show his relief too much. “So… ah… there’s one more thing. Unfortunately, as Starfleet was frantically searching for someone who would be able to help them locate me when I was abducted, they had to make the incident public. That might have caused… some hostility on Earth, which would only be enhanced by dropping the accession talks. In order to preserve friendship and a positive image of Ve’llarr, Starfleet commanders figured that it would be a good thing to broadcast your trial and present the events in a more… favorable light. All you would have to do is not to describe in detail what you did to me when I was on the Shiner, and stress how much you believed in your reasons for attacking Starfleet… It would also help if you apologized and expressed regret: it would give me a reason to ask that your punishment be cancelled, and the judges would agree.”  
“I will do this”, A’pwyllh declared after a moment. “I think I owe you this much. I can’t exactly regret having fought, now that it proved to have such a desirable outcome, but I do regret having hurt you in the process and I will be happy to apologize in public, as I apologize to you now. I would ask for your forgiveness, but I’m slightly confused… I feel it would be arrogant, but on the other hand… your actions seem to indicate that you have forgiven me already. I don’t really understand why…”  
“Well, at least one thing we have in common”, McCoy snapped, casting her a nasty look.  
“My personal feelings are not important”, Kirk answered. “I’m merely trying to implement Starfleet policies as best I can, for the general profit. That’s my duty as an officer.”  
“I see”, A’pwyllh answered slowly, and cautiously added: “May I inquire about your personal feelings? Do you think you can forgive me in your soul, or will you be made to pretend during this… public trial?”  
“What business is it of yours, you cheeky witch?”, McCoy interrupted again, earning a warning glance from Kirk, a raised eyebrow from Spock and a wave of sadness from A’pwyllh.  
“If you really had murdered my first officer, I would never be able to forgive you”, Kirk answered in near whisper, trying to keep his emotions at bay while his heart raced again, at the mere mention of this horrific possibility. “I would still no doubt try to comply with Starfleet orders, but it would be… extremely difficult. As it is, I guess I agree you deserve a second chance.”  
“Thank…”, A’pwyllh began to answer, only to be interrupted by McCoy’s another angry outburst:  
“You would deserve it more if you hadn’t been so fucking cruel! Your laws allegedly prohibit hurting people, and you’re so obsessed with everything Ve’llarran, so how the hell did it agree with torturing a man into insanity?!”  
“Doctor McCoy, that’s enough”, Kirk barked.  
“I regret it”, A’pwyllh explained, and she didn’t seem offended. “Besides, Ve’llarran laws only prohibit hurting innocent people. A Ve’llarran is entitled to punish, physically or otherwise, someone who has mistreated, offended, or harmed him or her. We don’t have trials or judges on our world. I treated Captain Kirk as a representative of an organization that had caused me and my family real harm, and punishing him felt right…”  
“Right! Right! Have you even heard her?! It felt right to torture the crap out of a defenseless, innocent person during an entire week, all the while plotting to destroy numerous other lives…”, McCoy looked as if he needed one of his hypos himself. Kirk didn’t bother disciplining him anymore, but put a hand on his shoulder again.  
“I’m merely explaining why I acted as I did”, A’pwyllh soothed. “You called your captain an innocent person, but is it really so? During your space exploration, Captain, how many lives have you taken? On how many ships have you ordered to open fire? How many of your missions have ended with people bleeding, hurting, or dying?...”  
“Too many”, Kirk whispered.  
“How the hell dare you?!” McCoy yelled at A’pwyllh, infuriated. Kirk’s confirmation of the accusations only angered him further. “Why not mention all the lives he saved? Entire planets saved from certain doom by his sacrifices? Do you know how much progress and hope our space exploration has brought to countless worlds?”  
“Doctor McCoy…” Kirk sighed, squeezing his irate friend’s shoulder to attract his attention. “I don’t believe I’m supposed to be on trial now, nor is Starfleet.” Addressing A’pwyllh, he then concluded: “I’m happy you agreed to cooperate. Once on Earth, Starfleet will debrief us about the details of what we should say during the trial, all right? In the meantime, as a sign of good will, I thought maybe you would like to spend some time with your friend Ellam. You could explain everything to him, as well, to avoid him a surprise when we arrive.”  
“Whatever you wish”, A’pwyllh answered, but the wave of joy that she projected betrayed that it was her wish much more than Kirk’s. The Captain gave her a little lopsided smile, and the four visitors left the brig, leaving adequate instructions to the guards.

Minutes before the trial, Spock and McCoy were both waiting with Kirk, seated on the corridor of San Francisco High Court, in a spot smartly separated from the main waiting area, unbelievably crowded by reporters, Starfleet officers wishing to attend, and other more or less essential participants. The thing seemed a little rushed, because mere several hours after Kirk first talked to A’pwyllh about it, Scotty finally managed to render the warp drive operational again, and they were on Earth’s orbit in a wink of an eye. They were greeted with honors, Admiral Komack personally led them to well secured Starfleet-owned hotel rooms in the center of San Francisco, and debriefed Kirk once more about what he was expected to say, what he was expected to hide, and how he was expected to behave. McCoy, who had given up on demanding justice for the criminals because it obviously was a lost cause, tried at least to convince the admiral that they should wait with the trial until his patient had had more time to recover, because he hadn’t even had full two weeks, but he could as well have talked to a wall, especially that Kirk himself protested that he was ready any time, undermining efficiently the doctor’s efforts. McCoy was glad at least not to be required to testify, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to contribute anything positive unless he lied, which he had no intention to do. Sitting directly outside the courtroom, he threw a sideways glance at Kirk, all stiff in his dress uniform that now fitted him a little loosely, watching his reflection in a glassy screen and struggling to keep a rebel sandy lock of hair out of his forehead.  
“Oh for goodness’ sake, Jim, I didn’t realize you were so vain!”, McCoy teased him. “It’s a trial, not a miss universe contest!”  
“You meant: mister universe”, Kirk corrected him. “I’m not vain, but it’ll be on the general broadcast, I’d hate it to look lame for thousands of people to watch. All right, it probably means I’m vain”, he conceded with a chuckle. McCoy joined him and silently relished seeing him so relaxed.  
“You can discontinue your efforts already, Jim”, Spock contributed in a light tone, almost with a hint of smugness. “Your looks are currently beyond further improvement.”  
“Oh! How dare you… Wait”, Kirk amended, remembering. “You actually mean to say I look good, don’t you?”, he asked happily. Spock nodded, his lips slightly arched in a shadow of an approving smile, and McCoy clapped his hands and exclaimed delighted:  
“Well, Jim, if this impassive Vulcan tells you you look good, you can be sure half of the ladies who’ll watch the broadcast will faint with awe!”  
“You exaggerate, Bones. Certainly not half of them – maybe some thirty percent”, Kirk retorted merrily, and, finally removing his look from his makeshift mirror, peered anxiously out on the part of the corridor open to the public.  
“Aw, I think I know your little secret, Jim”, McCoy teased him again. “It’s not for the broadcast that you’re trying to look your best. I think you’re waiting for someone… Someone you’d like to impress…”  
“Shut up, Bones…”  
“There’s no reason to be ashamed, Jim. Starfleet General Chief of Operations is smoking hot, and I wouldn’t quite miss an occasion on impressing her myself…”  
“Will you shut up already? The admiral promised me a date, but she’s nowhere to be seen…”  
“She promised you a date because she wanted to make you do what you were supposed to do”, McCoy blurted out and he bit his tongue as the carefree mood faded away, unnecessarily killed by his thoughtless remark. “Don’t you think you should concentrate on the trial instead of indulging in dirty fantasies about a fellow Starfleet officer?”, he added grumpily in an effort to cover his blunder. However, Kirk had no time to answer him, for Admiral Komack went out of the door leading directly to the courtroom and asked:  
“Are you ready, Captain? The judges would like to open the session, if you don’t mind.”  
“I don’t mind”, came the only possible reply. Kirk was led inside, flanked by his two friends, who nonetheless were made to sit on the audience, while Kirk was appointed a place next to the accuser. A whole crowd of different people, Federation citizens and Vellarans, were admitted inside to watch, but to his bitter disappointment, Kirk failed to spot Admiral Vavrenko among them. He noticed A’pwyllh, sitting at a certain distance from him, exceptionally calm and composed for a Vellaran, and he smiled bleakly in her direction, to which she answered by a reassuring nod: she remembered what she was supposed to say. After it finally got started, the trial seemed to progress at a stunning pace for Kirk, who dutifully delivered his attenuated testimony and listened to different witnesses deliver their formerly prepared parts: Spock relating his investigation, Na’mhanwr pointing out that, while the Federation was nothing less than a paradise, many Ve’llarrans effectively thought otherwise, and the Ve’llarran authorities had gone to certain lengths to silence them. Finally, Kirk got duly moved and almost tearful when in a breaking voice, A’pwyllh recited the story of all the sufferings that had led to her act of sheer desperation, and when she begged for his forgiveness for all the displeasure she had caused him, he didn’t even pretend enthusiasm as he fervently appealed to the judges to cancel any punishment that they might have had in mind for her and her crew. They, of course, agreed, because how could they refuse when a contrite terrorist – who now was rebaptized freedom fighter – together with her compassionate victim pleaded, reasoned, promised improvement? The gathered crowd, visibly stunned at first, gradually embraced the separatist’s perspective and when the judges, with some sheepish reluctance retained as a tribute to justice they were about to treat in a cavalier manner, announced their consent to the pleas, the cheers and applause nearly blew the roof off the courtroom. Some important personas, members of the Council, journalists and diplomats asked to speak to Kirk, and he smiled and nodded and thanked for the concern but it’s not necessary about a dozen times, the last three or four visibly lacking the vibrant ease of the previous ones. But then, Admiral Komack slapped his back and told him it was well done and a commendation was awaiting him, and it was suddenly all over, and he found himself on the street outside the building with Spock and McCoy, relieved about having done all this already, but feeling lightheaded with fatigue, and strangely empty. The trial had lasted most of the day, and had taken much of him physically and emotionally, but this fatigue could be swept away by a few hours’ sleep, unlike the deep weariness he felt in his soul, caused by all the lies, manipulations, pretense, confusing him to a point of not really knowing what he thought or felt anymore.  
“So? What do we do now? A crazy night in San Francisco?”, McCoy asked hopefully, but then he suddenly looked away, clearly awed by a sight he was contemplating. Kirk and Spock both turned that way too, and immediately understood the reason for McCoy’s confusion: Kirk’s date was approaching, running, in their direction, and she was definitely worth the wait, at least as far as her looks were concerned. She was absolutely gorgeous with long blond hair floating freely in the wind, her eyes adding depth and brilliance to the smile of her sensual lips, her graceful, perfectly shaped body lovingly described, but not entirely revealed by an ethereal, colorful dress.  
“I was losing hope you’d come”, Kirk told her, soothing the reproach with a happy smile.  
“Are you kidding? I’ve done nothing but wait since we spoke on subspace”, she said enthusiastically, scanning him. “You said you didn’t want to be distracted during the trial, so I waited until it all finished… But don’t worry, I followed the broadcast, and gosh, you were gorgeous! I was almost convinced you believed every word you said!”  
“Well,” Kirk answered slowly, his face falling a little, “that may be because I don’t know what I believe anymore myself… I guess that’s what you earn when you try to please everyone.”  
“Maybe so”, she answered unruffled, “but I hope you remember how you promised to please ME…” She walked shamelessly into Kirk’s personal space and climbed on her toes to whisper something straight to his ear, trapping his head with her hands to stop him from evading her words. He didn’t seem to have any intention to, anyway: he chuckled into her hair and whispered something back, then pulled back enough to face her, and, after a short moment that they spent lost in each other’s eyes, they suddenly started to kiss like there was no tomorrow. Spock gazed at them with one eyebrow slightly raised, while the doctor expressed his feelings by a long whistle. Hearing him, Kirk finally pulled away and asked Vavrenko:  
“Have you already met my first officer and my CMO?”  
“I have already had the plea… the occasion to meet your doctor”, Vavrenko answered when she caught her breath. Kirk chuckled, and McCoy turned a deep shade of red, but he countered trying not to lose his footing:  
“I’m never very tractable with people who try to undo my hard work on my patients.”  
“Yes, I probably deserved the treatment I got”, Vavrenko conceded. “A new beginning?” McCoy was all smiles when he kissed the offered hand instead of simply shaking it.  
“And this is Spock, my first officer”, Kirk added, gesturing to the Vulcan, who only nodded and was rewarded by a nod and a smile.  
“Gentlemen! I hope you don’t mind me kidnapping your captain for the evening…”, Vavrenko said, and, confronted by two sets of raised eyebrows, chuckled evilly, explaining: “I only meant I’d like to invite him for dinner, if it’s okay with you…”  
“A… dinner date?”, Kirk said, still smiling, trying his best to hide disappointment, but failing miserably. Vavrenko laughed.  
“If the dinner is fun, you’ll be permitted to walk me home afterwards, Captain”, she said playfully.  
“Can’t we skip dinner and move directly to that part?...”  
“No way! We’re hungry, I owe you a dinner, and I want to show you off…”  
“Mhm. I feel like I’ve been shown off sufficiently today… And you don’t owe me anything, because if you did, it would be much more than a dinner.”  
“You will get more, and not because I owe you. But dinner first. Come.”  
“Bones, Spock, see you tomorrow. Have a pleasant evening.”  
“You too, Jim”, McCoy answered, and then added under his breath: “But I don’t think you need my wishes for that. The admiral sure looks like a hell of a pleasant evening.” He turned to glance at Spock: the Vulcan was unreadable. “I bet you’re hungry, too, Spock. I, for one, am starving. I know a small restaurant not far from here, where they serve allegedly excellent Vulcan dishes, if you forgive the oxymoron. We could go grab a dinner.”  
“If you do not mind, Doctor, I prefer to retire to my room”, the Vulcan replied. “If you require company for your meal, I am sure some of the other crewmembers are available…”  
“No, Spock, I don’t require company.” McCoy insisted mockingly on the verb. “But I wanted to eat with you.” Blue eyes scrutinized the dark ones, and finally Spock dropped his gaze, showing the slightest hint of unease. “What is it? Are you unwell?” McCoy asked him.  
“I was merely wondering if you still have adverse feelings toward my person”, Spock answered levelly.  
“Why would you say that?” McCoy was surprised by the inquiry. He didn’t suspect that the Vulcan gave his feelings much thought, or cared about them the slightest bit, especially that Kirk had apparently forgiven him completely. He remembered all the horrible things he had blurted out to the Vulcan in his blind rage and he felt a little guilty. “Of course I’m not furious with you anymore, if that’s what you meant by ‘adverse feelings’, but we could discuss it more in detail over some barely palatable mash of green stuff. It’s that way.” He slowly engaged the lane that led to the Vulcan restaurant, and Spock reluctantly followed suit. “Anyway, you shouldn’t worry about my feelings”, McCoy added. “You saw? I even managed to annoy the admiral. You know I’m easy to anger.”  
“Maybe”, Spock agreed softly. “But in this situation, your anger was only logical. What I did to Jim was unforgivable. I know that he has forgiven me, and asked me to forgive myself, and I really am trying to grant his wish, but… I have not as yet fully succeeded.”  
McCoy felt a lump in his throat for Spock. He suddenly realized that if the Vulcan was sharing with him, who had been so cruel to him, the fact that he was still feeling guilty, then the emotion had to be really hard for Spock to bear.  
“You’re seeing too much into this”, he soothed in his most friendly tone. “People say things like that to each other all the time, and more often than not, they really mean them. We all try to be the best friends that we can to the people we care for, but we are only hu… living beings, and it is our nature to sometimes fail. Your intentions were good, Spock. Vulcan or not, you were shocked by your friend’s suffering, and there’s nothing wrong about it. You couldn’t have helped it, for one thing. You thought you were helping…”  
“I want you to know one thing, Doctor”, Spock announced with a gravity that slightly frightened McCoy. “Not for a second did it occur to me that Jim would truly believe my words. I chose to say them, because they seemed to me cruel, but absurd, and I thought he would hate me, for saying them, not that he would hate himself. I counted on his confidence, self-reliance…”  
“Yeah, Spock, I agree that Jim really lost it when he took your words at face value”, the doctor acquiesced amiably. “I’m sure he only believed you because deep down, he was already feeling like a worthless piece of shit. It’s not very logical, but tortures or other forms of abuse often have this effect on humans. But you couldn’t have known that. It’s all over now, and you needn’t worry about it anymore. Don’t Vulcans consider brooding over the past illogical, since past cannot be undone?”  
“They do”, Spock confirmed flatly. McCoy stopped and cast him a troubled look.  
“Listen, Spock… I’d like to apologize to you”, he said, and raised his hand in a restraining gesture when Spock wanted to interrupt him. “I completely failed you, as a friend as well as a doctor. I noticed that something was not okay with you after that meld, but instead of offering help, I only yelled at you for not visiting Jim in sickbay. What I told you after… was really awful, and I take back all the insults.”  
“You have already said that before”, Spock stated, “and I already told you it was illogical. Your actions helped me a great deal. It was you who made me see just how badly I had hurt Jim, and forced me to confront my own feelings. It was painful, Doctor, but necessary. I am grateful to you.”  
McCoy didn’t speak for a few moments, struggling with his need to argue, to disagree, to try and express further the guilt he was still feeling. Finally, he decided against it: he was perfectly able to tackle it alone, and didn’t need to burden Spock with it. He smiled.  
“Well, then, I guess we’ve talked it all over. Ah, there’s the restaurant. Come, let’s have some tasteless Vulcan pulp and relax. We’ve had a long day.”

It was four in the morning when Kirk finally showed up in his hotel. He was tired – no, he was exhausted, nearly dizzy with fatigue – and happy without reservations. Admiral Vavrenko – Nastia, as he was now authorized to call her – gave him this wonderful feeling of being wanted, desired, and somehow he felt that she would have been waiting for him even if he had completely screwed the trial. It was a relief to be in full control of his body and emotions again, and the feeling of returning normalcy was even more precious that the pleasure itself, though by no means negligible. Kirk was humming some old country tune under his breath as he crossed the corridors to reach his room. While he was struggling with the lock, he heard the familiar voice from the neighboring room:  
“You’re not going to sleep until you’ve told me everything!”, and a grinning McCoy showed in the door of his own room.  
“What? It’s too late, I’m half asleep already! What are you doing up anyway?”  
“You assumed, of course, you were the only one to have a date?”, McCoy asked teasingly.  
“Oh?” Kirk was beginning to show interest, but the fatigue still seemed to be winning.  
“Come, I’ll tell you everything over a glass of brandy.”  
“But… you said I wasn’t allowed to drink.”  
“Really? Drinking with your doctor is an exception.”  
“But you said this precisely when… Oh, never mind.” Kirk knew when he was defeated. McCoy ushered him triumphantly into his room, poured him a glass, another one for himself, then asked impatiently:  
“So? What was she like? Because the way she behaved around you, I was a little anxious she might really kidnap and devour you, you know…”  
“Bones, you are being nosy! She was…” Kirk paused a moment, and was unable to prevent his cheeks from burning as his voice trailed off. McCoy chuckled.  
“Don’t tell me you fell in love with her. That would be the most foolish thing you could do. I’ve informed myself a little about her. You know what’s the word among Starfleet grapevine?”  
“I have a feeling you’re about to tell me”, Kirk answered with a sigh.  
“Allegedly, she never sleeps twice with the same man. I mean, on two separate occasions, because the word about how many times she can sleep with a man during one night…”  
“All right, Bones, that’s enough! I’m under the impression that this bottle of brandy is not the only one you’ve opened tonight.”  
“Well, you’re wrong there. The previous one, though, only lacked a glass or two… I only wanted to say that I hope you had a memorable night, but don’t promise yourself too much…”  
“I had a most memorable night”, Kirk confirmed with a little lopsided smile, “but as you see, she doesn’t even do breakfasts. So, I guess the ‘grapevine’ has it more or less correct…”  
“But it was still worth it, right?”, McCoy inquired insistently, searching Kirk’s face for signs of sorrow or disappointment. He found none, and was laughed at instead.  
“Come on, Bones, I might be a little soft with women at times, but you don’t seriously believe I fall in love literally with every lady who shares my bed?” Seeing deliberately exaggerated hesitation on McCoy’s face, he threw a cushion at him with mock anger, and they both chuckled again. “What about your rendezvous?”, Kirk inquired.  
“Oh, it was fascinating, as my date would no doubt put it”, McCoy answered smugly.  
“You had dinner with Spock?” There was a distinct note of joy in the way this question was asked. Kirk felt rather than knew that the doctor resented the Vulcan for the unfortunate disdaining misunderstanding, and was happy to see the things seeming to smooth out between his two best friends.  
“Yeah, we ate some tasteless Vulcan pulp, but at least we could talk peacefully. In fact, Jim, there’s something I wanted to tell you”, McCoy finished in a much more serious note, gulping nervously at his brandy. By sheer precaution, Kirk downed his, and asked apprehensively:  
“Why do I feel like you’re gonna try and spoil my evening?”  
“Oh, no, nothing of the sort. I believe you deserved a fun evening ten times over. It’s just that…” McCoy hesitated visibly. He reached for the bottle, but then changed his mind.  
“All right, Bones, spit it out.”  
“I think your trust in Spock is exaggerated. Before you protest, I don’t mean you shouldn’t believe in his intentions, or competence. I’d trust him with my own life a thousand times. Only… you seem to believe he’s infallible, and can’t ever hurt or abandon you. I don’t think that’s true. He has weaknesses like any other living being, and seeing you deliberately reduced to agony must have been one of those. You’re a captain, Jim: you can’t just take Spock’s word on everything, and switch your mind off, suspending your own judgement when you have his… Of all things in universe, how could you seriously believe you’re despicable only because you showed some natural physiological and emotional reaction to barbaric torture?” McCoy stopped to take a breath, and felt a pang of remorse when Kirk gradually lost all remains of smile and hung his head sadly.  
“I really screwed that one up, didn’t I, Bones? I should have known better… I should have guessed immediately that Spock feared that our relationship had become too close, and was desperate enough to withdraw a little to deal me a blow like that…”  
“You can’t blame yourself”, McCoy amended softly. “You were a wreck, Jim, you were only beginning to recover from a shock…”  
“But that doesn’t justify me, does it? As you said: a captain should be able to rely on his own sound judgement…”  
“But that’s not the point, Jim”, McCoy interrupted him impatiently. “You always trust him so blindly, always see only good intentions, always forgive him immediately. So, you learned the real reasons why he treated you as he did. What makes you think he had the right to do it? Only because he painfully discovered how much he actually cared for you, does it mean he should have escaped and left you, insulting you in the process?”  
“Has it occurred to you, Bones”, Kirk countered, “that his action might, in fact, have been fully logical? That, pretexting protecting me, he might have been protecting himself in the most efficient way? Bones, what if I stopped him from departing by sheer selfishness, while purging his emotions could have been a way for him out of the pain, the illogic, the mess that emotions are at times? When he saw me on the Vellaran bridge, he got so angry it almost destroyed him. He went to the brig and broke into the minds of two people without even trying to question them! Bones, caring and friendships indeed make us vulnerable. You and I have learned to cherish this vulnerability, because as humans, we don’t really have another option, unless we want to be numb and empty and unhappy right from the start. But Spock? There are the Vulcan disciplines, the Kolinahr, maybe he would be better off fully devoted to his logic… You will never know, Bones, what this entire situation has cost him. That he didn’t break completely is only a testament to his extraordinary strength.”  
McCoy glanced at his friend thoughtfully. Well, at least I know what it has cost me, he thought. And what it has cost you. I won’t let him do this to you ever again.  
“I think Spock would easily overthrow your reasoning, Jim”, he said softly. “He’s half human, and he needs affection that the Vulcans have been denying him for so many years. He surely understands a close relationship is always worth the pain… Love is always worth the pain. Only… you know, just like you and me, he can only take so much pain. And as you said yourself, unlike us, he has a choice. So I wouldn’t be surprised if one day, he really chose Vulcan, even if it might not objectively be the best thing for him to do. Maybe not today, but one day, maybe in a similar situation, maybe in a different one, he can yet leave you, Jim, for his homeworld.”  
“I realize that, Bones”, Kirk answered firmly. “And if that’s what he one day judges best, I’ll accept his decision. I’m just happy that right now, he chose to stay.”  
As if on cue, there was a gentle knock on the door and after McCoy’s “come in”, it opened to admit Spock.  
“When I finished meditating, I heard you talking and concluded you were not sleeping”, he explained.  
“Indeed, we’re not; although some of us would have gone to bed long ago, if they hadn’t been treacherously ambushed”, Kirk answered, glaring at McCoy, who chuckled.  
“If this is the case, I will not hinder your opportunity at retiring to rest by my presence…”  
“No, no, please come have a drink with us!”, Kirk protested, pouring him a glass of brandy that the Vulcan accepted, eyeing it somewhat suspiciously.  
“So, the trial’s over, what do you intend to do right now?”, McCoy asked his two friends.  
“Starfleet granted me a week of recuperation leave”, Kirk answered. “My intention is to spend it in Iowa and make it up to my mom for the disaster my last visit turned to. Also, I have some childhood friends to meet up with…”  
“I still dispose of a lot of unused leave. Should you require company, I would be more than willing to come with you”, Spock said a little stiffly.  
“It would be a pleasure, Spock”, Kirk answered with a warm smile.  
“And I’ll go directly back to the Enterprise, I guess’, McCoy sighed. “I don’t think I have any leave left…”  
“Oh, Bones! I talked to Admiral Komack about you. I told him you could use a week off after all the hard work I gave you this time…”  
“But that’s very nice, Jim! Maybe I’ll stay in San Fran and check out their fun district?”  
“But… I didn’t say he agreed”, Kirk tempered his enthusiasm.  
“Oh… Well, did he?” McCoy asked, visibly deflated, missing a mischievous twinkle in his captain’s eye.  
“Sorry, Bones. He refused. He believes I’m not fit enough to go on leave without continued monitoring by my personal physician. So, I’m afraid the fun district will have to wait, as you’re stuck with babysitting me in Iowa, per Starfleet orders!”  
“Jim! That’s fantastic!” McCoy had to stop himself from hugging Kirk. He had only mentioned fun district because he wouldn’t dare invite himself to Iowa, especially after Spock had beat him to it, but that was exactly where he wanted to be the most. “I mean, if your mom doesn’t mind receiving half your crew at her place”, he added.  
“She’ll be happy”, Kirk assured him. “One evening, I’ll invite Tony, his parents and his wife and kids over to our farm and we’ll all have a meal together. Sounds like a safer idea than getting wasted in a bar…”  
“Indeed, the prospect is most pleasurable”, Spock agreed.  
“In the meantime, let’s not permit that this excellent brandy get wasted…” Kirk pointed to the still full glasses they were holding. “To us, gentlemen. To Ve'llar, and its friendship with the Federation, if on slightly different terms than we had imagined. To our future missions together, and new species we will discover and, hopefully, befriend.”  
They drank in silence, relishing the quietness of the morning hour, reflecting the calmness finally restored to their three souls after a violent storm.


End file.
